Annotated Bibliography

Summary of Article The article references the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA 2004). Students with disabilities are required to be in the least restrictive environment. This often allows students to be in an inclusion classroom. The article is concentrated on students on the Autism spectrum that are off-task in the general education classroom. This journal article uses peer support and several interventions including positive reinforcement, visual schedules, self-monitoring, and Prevent-Teach-Reinforce (PRT). By combining students on the Autism spectrum in the general education classroom using these interventions to combat off-task behaviors.

Critique of the Article

The purpose of the study was to evaluate

The participants were three males diagnosed with ASD. The participants were ages 7,8, and 11. Students were of average intelligence, and required minimal supports in the classroom. The dependent measure was off-task behavior. For two of the participants this behavior was defined as doing other work than the assigned work. It also included playing with items around them, crawling on the floor, and walking around. For the older subject his off-task behaviors included looking away from the assignment for more than five seconds, talking to peers, putting his head down, playing with other materials, and talking to his classmates. Another dependent variable was the peer questionnaire that was constructed by the examiner and was given to the subject’s peers. This questionnaire was to get the opinions of the peers of the student that had ASD. The goals were stated, but were not clear to follow. The article places a table of the teacher’s means of responses without clearly identifying what they were responding to. Then the article goes back to assessing the opinions, and peer training. I feel this should all be listed before you being finding the baseline

The results of this study indicated that the peer interventions were effective in reducing the off-task behaviors of the ASD students. I feel the approach in theory is an idea that can be implemented in the classroom, however, I feel that the study was very vague. I feel the subjects in this study were not all focused on the same off-task behaviors, and the observers, and peers did not do justice to the baseline data. I also found in rather interesting that there was no FBA done on the students. To me this is a necessity to start collecting data for a study. The authors of this study did indicate that more research is needed determine if interventions would help other children with ASD.

This study was an extension of previous work conducted by Arceneaux and Murdock (1997). The authors used over thirty sources for references. I feel this was more than enough to support their theory.

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