Intervention Study Of DTT And PRT Teaching On Common Attention Deficit In Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

The present study was meant to research whether the combination of discrete trial teaching(DTT)and pivotal response treatment(PRT)is effective to the defect of joint attention in children with autism spectrum disorder(ASD).The experimental method in this study was pre-and-post tests on the experimental group and control group.In the present research,14 children(58-81 months)with ASD was divided into intervention group(N=7)and control group(N=7)according to their performance in WPPSI and PPVT-R,and there was no significant difference in chronological age between two groups.7 children typically developing(TD)whose chronological age was similar to the children with ASD were chosen to confirm the mastery criterion on those target behavior.The 8 weeks of intervention to intervention group was carried out with DTT and PRT.The results were shown as follows:1.Compared to the children in TD group whose chronological age was similar with ASD group,the capacities in responding to joint attention(RJA)and initiating joint attention(IJA)of ASD group were obviously lower than TD group,while there was no significant difference in following pointing between the two groups;2.The intervention group achieved immediate effect on RJA and IJA,but there was no remarkable change in showing.As a result,the intervention group mastered three target skills after being intervened as follows:gaze following,gaze alternation and pointing;3.The RJA and IJA,including the three immediately mastered skills,were generalized across new objects in intervention group;4.In intervention group,the RJA and IJA were maintained to some degree.Among the immediately mastered behaviors,except for pointing,the other behaviors were maintained at one-month follow-up;5.In general,the quality of mastery to all target behavior in intervention group was sorted as follows:following pointing>gaze following>gaze alternation>pointing>showing.The conclusions of this study are shown as follows:1.Compared with children developing typically whose chronological age is similar with children with ASD,there exist defects in RJA and IJA in children with ASD.2.Compared with RJA,the defect in IJA of children with ASD is more serious.3.To some extent,the combination of DTT and PRT can improve the capacities in RJA and IJA of children with ASD and contribute to the maintenance and generalization of immediate effect.4.Compared with IJA,children with ASD learn RJA more easily,and there exists difference in quality of mastery to sub-items in IJA.