Efeitos do ensino de recontar histórias: sobre responder perguntas de compreensão em crianças e jovens com autismo

Abstract

Children diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) commonly have difficulty acquiring socially and academically important repertoires, such as retelling stories and answering comprehension questions. These repertoires are intraverbal, which are verbal operants comprising the emission of verbal responses in the presence of antecedent verbal stimuli (with no point-to-point correspondence between them), and the responses are maintained by generalized conditioned reinforcement. The present study was carried out with three children diagnosed with ASD, two aged 5 years and the other aged 7 years. Three teaching procedures (normal chaining – EN; backwards chaining – ETF; and script fading – ER) were compared for efficiency in establishing story retelling repertoire (first dependent variable-DV) independently and without clues needed. For two children, EN was more efficient, as the retelling of the story through this procedure was produced more quickly (with fewer teaching sessions). In the case of the other child, the ETF procedure was what produced the fastest story retelling, which was the most efficient for this participant. Continuous exposure to stories during retelling teaching, through different procedures, also influenced the acquisition of another repertoire related to answering questions about the stories (second DV) in all children and without the need for direct teaching. The data were discussed in the sense that, if the teaching contingencies implemented in the research are important for the social and academic formation of children with ASD, producing gains beyond what is directly taught, they can favor processes of social and school inclusion.