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This study aims to use a sequentially implemented intervention package to reduce the occurrence of perseverative requesting and other problem behavior in a young girl with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

In this single-case study, subsequent to a functional analysis and a preference assessment, an intervention package consisting of three components (i.e. a tolerance for delay to reinforcement, choice-making and visual schedule) was implemented sequentially to address perseverative requesting and other problem behavior maintained by access to preferred items/activities in a young girl with ASD.

Via the intervention package, the girl demonstrated higher self-control skills (i.e. delaying access to preferred items/activities, choosing more preferred items/activities with delayed access over less preferred ones with immediate access, completing tasks before having access to preferred items/activities) with a reduction of perseverative requesting or other problem behavior.

The current case study presents concrete steps that could be applied to address tangible-maintained perseverative requesting using more natural and educationally relevant signals while improving the child’s appropriate skills (e.g. delay to reinforcement, self-control and task engagement).

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) or other developmental disabilities are often reported to have challenges in well generalizing the newly learned communicative skills such as requesting help. Not requesting help when it is needed can hinder engagement and learning, whereas requesting help could also be socially inappropriate. This paper aims to offer a demonstration of applying general case instruction to teach a young child diagnosed with ASD to request help only when needed while concurrently increasing the child’s independence in task completion.

The demonstration adopted within-participant AB designs for one 5-year-old boy with ASD, with data collected across three tasks targeted for intervention and the other three tasks targeted for generalization probes throughout both the baseline and intervention phases. Dependent measures consisted of independent help request and independent task completion. Visual analysis was used to describe the results.

Results showed that the child with ASD learned to ask for help on difficult educational activities, while concurrently increasing his independence on these tasks; generalized the skill of requesting help by asking for help when he encountered other challenging novel tasks; and independently completed easy educational activities without requesting help.

The findings from this study may add to the limited literature that explored the generalization performance across tasks/activities in young learners with ASD, while demonstrating the feasibility of designing and applying general case instruction framework to enhance generalization performance for one individual learner.