| Educational opportunity and experience in the community provide students with Mental Retardation the opportunity to learn and to rehearse skills they need in order to demonstrate the necessary skills to fully participate in community environments. The degree to which students with Mental Retardation participate in their communities is often dependent on their ability to demonstrate appropriate behaviors in the community. As part of the educational services, students with Mental Retardation participate in community-based vocational training to prepare them in becoming active members of their community. For students with Mental Retardation who exhibit socially inappropriate behavior, access to community programs may be limited or even denied. The purpose of this study was to investigate the identification and selection of interventions for inappropriate social behaviors maintained by negative reinforcement in public community settings. Four high-school-aged students with moderate to severe mental retardation participated in a Brief Functional Behavior Analysis, to identify maintaining contingencies of target behaviors. Based on the resulting hypotheses, antecedent-based and response-based interventions were designed and compared. Results indicated that the antecedent-based intervention of self operated auditory prompts worked, as effectively as or better than, the response-based intervention of Differential Reinforcement of Alternative Behaviors. In addition, teachers completed an adapted Intervention Rating Profile-15 for public community settings that assessed the social acceptability of both interventions. Moreover, teachers indicated that auditory prompts were socially acceptable for vocational training in public community settings. |
