The Effects of Playful Physical Contact as an Establishing Operation on Correct Academic Responding of Three Preschool Students.

Abstract

Motivating individuals with developmental disabilities can be challenging to educators (Egel, 1981, Greer, 2002). In an effort to motivate them, the effects of variation of reinforcer stimuli on correct responding and on-task behavior of individuals with disabilities have been tested (Egel, 1981) and those of variation of antecedent stimuli during discrimination tasks have been evaluated (Dunlap & Koegel, 1980). The influence of antecedent and consequent variables on problematic behaviors were also tested (Carr, Yarbrough, & Langdon, (1997); Mace & Lalli, 1991); and Repp, Felce, & Barton, 1988) in relation to the motivational variables. The results of these studies demonstrated that arrangement of antecedent stimuli or consequent stimuli affected behaviors of individuals with developmental disabilities. However, there were other variables in addition to the core components of the three-term contingencies that affected behaviors of individuals with disabilities (Berg, Peck, Wacker, Harding, McComas, Richman, & Brown, 2000). Several studies identified instructional history as one of variables that affect children's acquisition of verbal operants (Greer, Nirgudkar, & Park, 2003; Greer, Stolfi, Chavez-Brown, & Rivera-Valdez, 2005; Lee Park, 2005). For example, in Greer et al.'s study (2005), young children with developmental disabilities who did not exhibit Naming prior to the study acquired Naming as a higher order operant after they had instructional history of Naming through multiple exemplar instruction. Another variable that affects acquisition of new operants is establishing operations (EOs). William and Greer (1993) created EOs by placing children under deprivation for specific items in order to create a motivational context, which is necessary in the acquisition of a verbal operant: the mand. Other studies also demonstrated EOs as necessary components of children's learning of new verbal operants (Hall & Sundberg, 1987; Ross, Nuzzolo, Stolfi, Natarelli, & Greer, 2006; Reilly-Lawson & Greer, 2006). As we mentioned above, the three-term contingencies were affected by establishing operations (EOs) as the contexts of the contingencies that preceded the antecedent stimuli (Greer, 2002). EOs as motivational events alter the value of reinforcers that follow responses and thus affect the probability of the responses (Greer, 2002; Greer & Ross, 2008; Michael, 1982). For example, after parents arrange deprivation of playing a computer game by not allowing a child to play the game for a period of time, the child is more likely to finish his/her homework in order to gain the assess to the computer game. In this case, deprivation of playing the computer game is establishing operation and this increases the reinforcement effects of the games and the probability of finishing his/her homework. In O'Reilly's (1999) study, four analogue analysis conditions (i.e., attention, demand, leisure, and play) were randomly conducted in order to test the effects of pre-session attention on the occurrence of attention-maintained yelling and head hitting. Levels of attention (no attention versus high attention) were manipulated prior to the analogue analysis condition to test the influence of pre-session attention on the problem behavior during the attention analogue condition. The results showed that higher levels of yelling and head hitting occurred when the participant was deprived of attention prior to the attention analogue condition. McComas, Thompson, and Johnson (2003) tested the effects of pre-session attention on the subsequent occurrences of problem behavior with elementary school students with disabilities. In their study, variation of continuous attention conditions was followed by ignoring conditions on attention-maintained or escape-maintained problem behaviors. The results showed that the pre-session exposure to attention decreased attention-maintained problem behaviors, whereas it did not affect escape-maintained problem behaviors. …