Abstract
Preschool offers numerous opportunities for teaching cognitive, social, emotional, and language skills. This is particularly important for children with developmental delay (DD), who often struggle with cognitive, physical, communication, social/emotional, and adaptive development. Prompting using verbal, gestural, and physical guidance has been widely used to teach new behaviors or skills. Given the importance of early childhood education, this systematic review examined the effect of prompting in the acquisition of new skills for preschoolers with DD. Fourteen studies using single-subject research design across nine journals served as the basis of this review. Participants' demographics, experimental design, target skills, types of prompting, independent and dependent variables, degree to which the prompting was effective, pairing, and number of prompts used in an intervention were extracted from each study and analyzed. The findings revealed the importance of prompting, and its various forms, for children with DD to support their strengths and enhance targeted skills as needed.
TopIntroduction
Preschool is essential for helping children learn basic life skills, such as social, communication, and hands-on motor skills, as well as language and pre-academic skills (e.g., Fahmie & Luczynski, 2018; Green et al., 2018; Hastie et al., 2018; Travers & Fefer, 2017). While early childhood schooling is viewed as a sound venue for all children to acquire new skills (DiCarlo et al., 2017; Steele et al., 2015), this learning space is of particular importance to students with disabilities. For example, children with developmental delay (DD) generally struggle in cognitive, physical, communication, social/emotional, and adaptive development. Thus, multiple strategies to enhance the learning of new skills have been implemented for these children in inclusive early childhood educational settings (e.g., Davenport & Johnston, 2015; Fentress & Lerman, 2012; Stanton-Chapman & Brown, 2015).
Specifically, instructional methods for children with DD have been created and implemented in the practice of applied behavior analysis (ABA) (Esposito et al., 2017; Seaver & Bourret, 2014). Some of these include discrete trial training (Young et al., 2016), incidental teaching (Neely et al., 2016), and chaining (Chazin et al., 2017). Each of these instructional methods includes the use of prompting as a component of the intervention.