Effects of A Peer-Delivered Simultaneous Prompting Strategy to Teach Core Content Combined with Physical Activity to Students with Intellectual Disability

Learning prepositions is very important for students with an intellectual disability to engage in functional communication behaviors. In addition, it is important for the students with intellectual disability to engage in physical activity at school because they spend the majority of their waking hours during weekdays at school. One way to increase both academic learning and physical activity level is to combine academic core content learning with physical activity. Simultaneous prompting is one of the response prompting procedures, which are evidence-based practices, and has been used as an effective way to teach both academic core contents and functional skills to students with intellectual disability. Peer tutoring also has been an effective teaching strategy to increase social aspects as well as academic learning for students with intellectual disability. In this study, I used a single-case multiple probe across participants design to examine the effects of a peer-delivered simultaneous prompting procedure in teaching locative prepositions combined with movement skills to students with intellectual disability. Five elementary school students with a mild to moderate intellectual disability participated in this study as the target participants. One peer without a disability enrolled in the same school with the target participants was the peer tutor and a data collector. The special education teacher participated in social validity data collection. Results of the study demonstrated a functional relation between the first primary dependent variable (i.e., action of prepositions to verbal prompt) and the intervention. Three out of five target participants showed some improvement in responding to nontargeted information (i.e., labeling of prepositions). For the movement skills measured by the Test of Gross Motor Development (TGMD; Ulrich, 2000), all target participants acquired higher scores in the posttest compared to their pretest scores. Further, four out of five target participants demonstrated some improvement in generalizing their knowledge of action of prepositions to verbal prompt to other materials and three target participants showed improvement in generalizing their knowledge of labeling of prepositions to other materials. Social validity data collected from the special education teacher, the peer tutor, and the target participants showed that they agreed the intervention was beneficial to all participants academically and socially. In addition, throughout the study, the peer tutor conducted both probe and training sessions with high procedural fidelity data. Limitations of the current study and suggestions for future research are discussed.