REGULAR ARTICLES Developmental Specificity in Targeting and Teaching Play Activities to Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders KARIN LIFTER Northeastern University

Developmentally specific play programs were designed for three children with pervasive developmental disorders being served in a home-based program. Using the Developmental Play Assessment, six activities for each of three adjacent developmentally sequenced play categories were targeted for direct instruction using different toy sets. A modified multiple-baseline across play targets design was employed. Teaching procedures capitalized on following the child’s lead and employed least-to-most prompting procedures. Results showed children reached acquisition criteria for 85 % (range: 75-100%) of 40 play activities that were generated from emerging play categories and 81 % (range: 50-100%) of 16 play activities generated from successive, but non-emerging play categories. Findings are discussed related to the importance of increasing developmental specificity when targeting and teaching play activities. Several studies have validated procedures fo-cused on increasing the complexity of play be-haviors exhibited by young children with de-velopmental disabilities. These studies have included teaching the particular properties of objects to children with developmental delays (Haring, 1985), teaching object or pretend play to children with developmental disabili