Life skills instruction for children with developmental disabilities MELINDA A. ROBISON UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS AND COOK CHILDREN’S CHILD STUDY CENTER TRACIE B. MANN COOK CHILDREN’S CHILD STUDY CENTER EINAR T. INGVARSSON VIRGINIA INSTITUTE OF AUTISM The Preschool Life Skills program is an intervention package designed to teach functional skills to prevent problem behavior in typically developing children. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of the instructional package (renamed “Life Skills”) with children with developmental disabilities. The program involved teaching 12 life skills to nine participants across four instructional units. The units were instruction following, functional communication, tolerance of denial and delay, and friendship skills. Teachers provided instruction through a three-tiered instructional approach, starting with class-wide instruction followed by small group and one-to-one instruction as necessary. We extended previous research by using visual prompts during all three tiers and progressively increasing intertrial intervals during one-to-one instruc- tion. Results indicated that the intervention led to skill acquisition with all nine participants. The skills maintained 4 weeks after instruction ended. Key words: autism, behavioral skills training, developmental disabilities, functional commu- nication, social skills Hanley, Heal, Tiger, and Ingvarsson (2007) developed the Preschool Life Skills (PLS) pro- gram to increase social and communication skills and prevent problem behavior in typically developing preschool children. They defined PLS as “…desirable responses to commonly occurring and evocative classroom situations…” (p. 278). The study was a response to research suggesting that the amount of time children spent in nonmaternal care correlated positively with occurrence of problem behavior (National Institute of Child Health and Human Develop- ment, 2003). Further, more time spent in nonmaternal care was shown to be correlated with increases in the probability of impulsivity and risk-taking extending into adolescence. However, high-quality childcare appears to mit- igate these risks to some extent (Belsky et al., 2007; Donaldson & Austin, 2017; Vandell, Belsky, Burchinal, Steinberg, & Van- dergrift, 2010). The PLS program included instruction fol- lowing, functional communication, tolerance of delays, and friendship skills, based on the rele- vant literature on school readiness (e.g., Heaviside & Farris, 1993; Lin, Law- rence, & Gorrell, 2003; Piotrkowski, Botsko, & Matthews, 2001), as well as the functional assessment and treatment of problem behavior (e.g., Ala’i-Rosales et al., 2019; Carr & Durand, 1985; Hanley, Iwata, & Thompson, 2001). In the original study, instruction occurred on a class-wide level with 16 preschool children. Classroom instructors repeatedly This study was conducted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the first author’s master’s degree at the University of North Texas. We thank Felicity Gomez, Rebecca Jimenez, Kelly Ho, Claire Cartmel, and Kimberly Fairman for assistance with data collection. Address correspondence to: Tracie B. Mann, Cook Children’s Child Study Center, 1300 West Lancaster Ave- nue, Fort Worth, Texas 76102 (email: tracie. mann@cookchildrens.org) doi: 10.1002/jaba.602 JOURNAL OF APPLIED BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 2020, 53, 431–448 NUMBER 1(WINTER) © 2019 Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 431