The Effectiveness of Most-To-Least Promting on Teaching Self-Care Skills

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the effectiveness of the most to least prompting procedure on teaching chained self-care skills to students with developmental disabilities. Three students with developmental disabilities participated in this study. All subjects were attending a university unit for the early childhood students with special needs. Amultiple probe design across behaviors, replicated across students was used to investigate the effectiveness of the most-to-least prompting procedure on teaching self-care skills to the subjects. All sessions were conducted at the sink of the self-care classroom at the university unit. An Individualized education program was developed for each target behavior. As mentioned before most to least prompting procedure was used to teach these target behaviors. During instruction full physical prompting, partial physical promting, verbal prompting and independent performance techniques were used. The dependent measure was the percentage of correct responding to the task analyses. There were two types of subject responses: (a) correct responses, and (b) incorrect responses. The criteria were at least 80% correct responding of each target behavior. Both types of reliability, interobserver reliability and procedural reliability, data were collected during 20 % of all sessions. The results of the study revealed that most-to-least prompting was effective in teaching chained self-care skills to students with developmental disabilities.