The percentage of children with special needs receiving academic instruction at home has substantially increased since a resurgence of homeschooling during the 1990s. In light of this information, the purpose of this article was to provide an overview of the history and laws related to homeschooling, the characteristics of homeschool families, and the relevant issues that parents of children with disabilities encountered when choosing to homeschool. This is followed by a discussion of the reasons parents chose to homeschool their children with special needs, as well as the current state of research on homeschooling students with disabilities. Finally, suggestions related to 90
Coaching parents to implement evidence-based strategies is one method for increasing the number of hours young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) access intervention services. The purpose of this study was to teach parents of young children with ASD to implement naturalistic strategies during play in a clinic setting. Results indicate a brief coaching procedure was effective for training parents to implement behavioral strategies, with concomitant changes in child behavior. Additional research is needed to determine how to facilitate maintenance over time and whether effects generalize to typical settings.
Children with communication delays often display difficulties labeling stimuli in their environment, particularly related to actions. Research supports direct instruction with video and picture stimuli for increasing children's action labeling repertoires; however, no studies have compared which type of stimuli results in more efficient, maintainable, or generalizable learning for children with communication delays. In the present study, we used a single-case adapted alternating treatments design to compare picture and video stimuli for teaching action labels to three preschool-aged children receiving special education services in a self-contained setting for communication delays. Results indicate that all children acquired target action labels using both picture and video stimuli, and all children generalized some targets to in vivo stimuli without direct instruction. Efficiency, generalization, and maintenance measures varied across children. Implications and future directions for researchers and practitioners are provided.
When de-institutionalization occurred for individuals with disabilities in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers in the field of behavior analysis began to discuss the importance of intervening on behaviors of social importance (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968;Nirje, 1969). This shifted focus in the field from selecting dependent variables out of experimental convenience to those of social significance (Baer et al., 1968). Conscientious researchers began conducting more studies that evaluated interventions for teaching skills essential for participants' independence and community inclusion (e.g., Nirje, 1969). Some early studies targeting skills with social application to participants with disabilities focused on skills such as sewing (
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