Using a System of Least Prompts Procedure to Teach Telephone Skills to Elementary Students with Cognitive Disabilities

Findings

To view more detailed information about the study findings from this review, please see System of Least Prompts Intervention Report (236 KB)

Evidence Tier rating based solely on this study. This intervention may achieve a higher tier when combined with the full body of evidence.

Study Details

Setting

The study took place in a special education resource room for students with “functional mental disabilities” in a rural elementary school in the United States.

Study sample

This study included three fourth-grade students (Bea, Chip, and Max) with intellectual disability. Bea was a 9-year-old girl with an IQ of 60 measured with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-4th Ed. (WISC-IV; Kaplan et al., 2004) and was diagnosed with “mild mental disability and a communication deficit in receptive language and expressive language.” Chip was a 10-year-old boy with an IQ of 61 on the WISC-IV, and had a diagnosis of “mild mental disability, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and communication deficits in articulation, fluency, receptive language, and expressive language.” Max was a 9-year-old boy with an IQ of 45 on the WISC-IV, and had a diagnosis of “a moderate disability, a congenital heart condition, Down syndrome, and communication delays in expressive and receptive language and articulation.”

Intervention

The System of Least Prompts (SLP) was used to teach students to make two types of phone calls: live calls and recorded calls. The live call task involved 12 steps (such as stating a greeting and asking a question), and the recorded call task involved 11 steps (such as identifying the person being called and stating where the caller could be reached). The interventionist in the study was the resource room teacher. During the SLP sessions, the teacher provided a hierarchy of prompts to help students complete the steps correctly. This hierarchy included a (1) direct verbal prompt, (2) direct verbal prompt plus a model prompt, and (3) direct verbal prompt plus a physical prompt, if appropriate. At each prompt level, the participant had 3 seconds to initiate a response before the teacher would apply the next prompt. The teacher used this instructional practice twice a day (after breakfast and after lunch), working one-on-one with participants in the special education resource room. For each participant, instruction continued until the student was able to complete 100% of the steps independently for 3 days. The number of intervention sessions required to reach this criterion varied from 10 to 16. At the end of each session, regardless of performance, students would receive a stamp that could be traded for a reward once five stamps were accumulated. (This practice of giving students stamps to trade in for rewards was part of the standard classroom behavior management process used by the resource room teacher.)

Comparison

Baseline sessions took place in the same special education resource room as the intervention, after breakfast and after lunch, and required the students to complete the same steps as in the intervention phases. The teacher gave a cue to the participant such as, ‘‘It’s time to make phone calls,’’ and then presented the phone book to the student with the direction, ‘‘Who are you calling?’’ or ‘‘Let’s call (person’s name).’’ The teacher did not provide assistance or prompting. Students had 3 seconds to initiate a response but only one opportunity to complete each step. If a correct response was not provided by the student in that timeframe, the teacher prepared the student for the next step in the task. If the next step in the sequence was not performed correctly, the teacher ended the session.