Teaching picture-to-object relations in picture-based requesting by children with autism: a comparison between error prevention and error correction teaching procedures

Background Children who have a combination of language and developmental disabilities with autism often experience major difficulties in learning relations between objects and their graphic representations. Therefore, they would benefit from teaching procedures that minimize their difficulties in acquiring these relations. This study compared two teaching procedures, an error prevention procedure and an error correction procedure, for teaching relations between objects and pictures. Method Participants were two groups of children with autism, aged between 3 and 7 years. In the context of picture-to-object requesting, one group was taught using an error correction method and the other group with an error prevention method. The measures for each child were accuracy of correspondences between taught picture and object pairs and accuracy of delayed correspondences in learning outcome tests with all combinations of object and picture pairs presented to them throughout the study. Results The group receiving the error prevention-based teaching made significantly fewer errors during the teaching phases and in their learning outcome test for correspondences between all combinations of pictures and objects. Conclusions The error prevention teaching procedure would seem to provide a more efficient and ecologically valid method than the error correction procedure for teaching relations between objects and their graphic-based referents. Improvements in the methodology were suggested for providing a stronger basis for comparison between error correction and error prevention teaching methods.