An analysis of the social behavior of developmentally disabled children

Two experiments were performed to study the effects of various teaching procedures on the social behavior of two to ten year old children classified as developmentally disabled. For the first experiment, it was hypothesized that instruction in one response class of social behavior would maximally increase that class of responding in subsequent free play relative to instruction in a different response class. The dependent measures included cooperation, giving, touching, directed verbalizations, and imitation measured during five minutes of free play at the end of each training session. Nonsocial perceptual skills, imitation, giving, and touching each were taught to four groups designed such that two orders of presentation were crossed with small and large children. A multivariate analysis of variance and five univariate analyses of variance were performed on the five dependent variables. It was found that teaching no particular behavior resulted in an increase for all dependent variables. No particular social behavior was facilitated in free play by directly training that behavior. It was concluded that the social behaviors studied are too complex to be simply increased in a free play situation by teaching of a particular behavior in a structured teaching situation