Date of Award

2012

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (EdD)

Department

Philosophy

Abstract

Far less is known about the effects of functional communication-based toileting interventions for students with developmental disabilities in a school setting. Furthermore, the currently available toileting interventions for students with disabilities include some undesirable procedures such as the use of punishment, unnatural clinic/university settings as opposed to more natural school/home settings, and prompt-based as opposed to communicative, self-initiating skills. The current study examined the effectiveness of FCT on the incidence of communicative, self-initiated toileting and of toileting accidents without any punishment components, which were often considered as necessary in traditional toileting procedures. A multiple baseline design was used for the concurrent measurement of the target behaviors across the participants with the random assignement of the paricipants to the FCT intervention. The results of this study indicated that the present FCT intervention was effective in teaching of communicative, self-initiated toileting behavior in a school setting for some students with developmental disabilities. It seemed to be that the effects of the FCT intervention without punishment might take longer than the intervention with punishment. Future studies may explore how much parent participation and each participant's cognitive functioning level are related to the degree of increasing communicative, self-initiated toileting behavior. In addition, the future research may focus on FCT intervention without punishment components for individuals with other developmental disabilities.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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