Teaching Independence and Complex Social Behavior to Young Learners on the Autism Spectrum Using Activity Schedules

Children on the autism spectrum may benefit from structured visual supports to support independent responses. Activity schedules, which are a type of visual support composed of pictures or words that cue an individual to engage in a sequence of responding, are an empirically supported intervention strategy that hase been used to address a wide variety of target behaviors. Interventionists often use physical prompting and prompt fading procedures to teach schedule-following, and systematically fade these supports so the activity schedule itself cues the child to respond. This chapter includes a description of a basic activity schedule and a summary of schedule teaching considerations for teaching young children on the autism spectrum to use activity schedules. The chapter also includes a menu of options for increasing activity schedule complexity (including how to implement social activity schedules) and an explanation of different activity schedule modalities.