W. Joseph Wyatt, Editor

Hurricane, WV–Most of us appreciate a predictable lifestyle. It is no surprise that mildly retarded individuals feel the same way.

That has been found true for James and John, 18-year-old mildly retarded young men, each with histories of severely disruptive behavior. Both frequently destroyed property and James frequently caused physical injuries to staff in the group homes where they lived.

But researchers Joseph S. Lalli of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Sean Casey, Han Goh, and Joann Merlino of the Children’s Seashore House in Philadelphia, put a virtual stop to the destructive and assaultive behavior. And, believe it or not, a central element to their training program involved simply teaching the young men to read their daily schedules. Prior to teaching them to read their schedules, the young men were able to “read” their typical activities off a schedule that used photos of the activities instead of printed words. Their day consisted of 16 routine activities in a natural order, such as getting dressed after a shower, cleaning up after a meal and the usual activities of daily living.

But while using the photographic schedules James averaged 11 destructive behaviors per hour, while John averaged about five problem behaviors per hour. After learning to read from a printed-word activity schedule the aggressive and destructive behaviors dropped dramatically to about two per hour for James and one every hour for John. And the boys’ agreeableness seemed to improve as well. James went from doing 26% of the activities on his schedule to doing 79%. John improved from 18% to 86% compliance with the scheduled activities, all due to the use of written words instead of photographs.

The researchers were careful to use consistent praise when the activities were completed, and were careful to block the aggressive activity with a forearm or simply back away if one of the young men became aggressive. But this procedure, often called “escape extinction,” was done during the use of photographs too. So it must have been the use of printed schedules instead of photographic schedules, that resulted in much of the improvement in the boys’ behaviors.

The researchers speculate that perhaps the printed schedules worked better because they allowed the men to better predict the upcoming events on the schedule, or perhaps it was simply that, “the printed schedule was more age-appropriate than the photographic schedule, and the participants may have preferred these stimuli rather than the photographs.”

Lalli, J. S., Casey, S., Goh, H., & Merlino, J. (1994). Treatment of escape-maintained aberrant behavior with escape extinction and predictable routines. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 27, 705-714.

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