Peer to Peer Manding

Generally children learn to enjoy the company of other children as they develop verbal competencies in interacting with adults. Peer interactions become more important as children become preschool age and remain a source of enjoyment and learning for most children throughout the remainder of childhood. For children with autism, peer relations will often fail to develop unless specifically taught. In order to teach interactions with peers as having value, instructors must work to establish peers as conditioned reinforcers. This process will involve all of the same steps involved in establishing adults as conditioned reinforcers. Some significant differences are usually present, however. Other children may not be as willing to share reinforcers with peers. Children often need to be taught to deliver things that are of value to someone else. Indeed a key aspect of training peers to deliver reinforcers to other children will involve use of reinforcement for the child who delivers items to a peer. At times it may be appropriate to signal availability of reinforcement to the peer who is delivering the reinforcer (this is known as a promise reinforcer) by prompting the student to give the reinforcer to the peer while showing a reinforcer which will be immediately delivered upon the student successfully delivering the item to the peer. Another consideration during the initial phase is to use reinforcers that are valuable for the student who is being trained how to mand but not for the student who is delivering the reinforcer. Once the peers are established as sources of reinforcement, then instructors can begin teaching children to make requests to peers. The process of peer to peer manding can be a fun process but quite often requires careful planning and implementation. The way data is collected will vary depending on how many students are involved. If the session involves training only one student how to mand, then data collection on prompted and unprompted mands can be done in similar fashion as sessions conducted by instructors. However, when multiple students are involved, then the use of data sheets that allow for efficient data collection is critical.

Mark Y on probe if student requests from peer with no prompts. Tally total number of prompted (P) and un-prompted (UP) mand for each student. Shaded column on left represents student who initiated the mand, white row across top is student who delivers reinforcement.