Can learning to check and evaluate their own behavior help autistic students stay on task and finish their work?

Details

Researchers taught students ways to guide their own behavior: arranging cues before a task, checking what they were doing, evaluating their performance and rewarding themselves. They used a single-subject research design that repeatedly checked individual students’ performance across teaching phases, rather than a randomized group trial.

Students learned the strategies and continued using them after teaching ended. Compared with before teaching, they also stayed on task more and improved their task completion. These behavioral gains were maintained after the intervention and carried over to different people and environments. Participants also gave positive feedback about the strategies and their effects.

The findings support this approach for the students studied. The abstract does not give participant numbers or ages, the size of the improvements or the length of follow-up, so it cannot establish how broadly the findings apply or how long the gains might last.