Building Play Skills Using Video Modeling and Matrix Training

Children with autism spectrum disorder often lack fundamental play skills, which can aid development with social, language, and imitation skills (Boutot et al. 2005). The purpose of this study was to extend the previous literature that successfully combined video modeling and matrix training. Matrix training is an efficient way of teaching that encourages generalization without direct teaching of some skills. In this study, play actions were selected from a 2D, 6 × 6 matrix to teach pretend play skills to 3–5-year-old children with a diagnosis of ASD. Play actions were made up of different toy kitchen foods and play actions within a play kitchen setting (e.g., rinse the carrot and cut the pear). Using a multiple probe design across behaviors, the play actions were taught using video modeling and other play actions from the matrix were later assessed for recombinative generalization. Overall, matrix training was effective for producing recombinative generalization, although additional training was required for 1 out of the 3 participants.