Preschoolers’ compliance with simple instructions: A description and experimental evaluation

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Kansas, Applied Behavioral Science, 2007.The present study extends previous research on child compliance by describing compliance levels of 15 preschool-aged children, and then evaluating the effects and limits of antecedent and consequence-based strategies within parametric analyses. Our descriptive assessment, which was administered in a similar manner across pairs of preschoolers, showed that compliance was relatively stable for individual children, variable across children, and was positively correlated with age. The impact of six antecedent variables (proximity, position, physical contact, eye contact, vocal attention, and play interruption) was assessed on compliance with four children. The effects of three-step (vocal, model, physical) prompting were then assessed alone, in combination with the antecedent variables, and at different integrity levels for two children. Results of the experimental analyses showed that compliance gradually increased with the addition of each antecedent variable for two of the four children. Three-step prompting in combination with the six antecedent variables increased compliance to high levels for the remaining two children, and high compliance levels maintained until treatment integrity was deceased to 20% of full strength. Implications for promoting high levels of preschooler compliance in the classroom and for the continued study of preschooler compliance are discussed. Descriptors. antecedent intervention, compliance, preschoolers, three-step prompting, treatment integrity