Joseph M Lambert, Bailey A Copeland, Erica L Karp, Crystal I Finley, Nealetta J Houchins-Juarez, Jennifer R Ledford
Individuals with developmental disabilities successfully participate in fewer recreation activities, including sports activities, than their typically developing peers. Although a functional basketball-playing repertoire might increase social opportunities and physical health for these individuals, no research has outlined a behavior-analytic strategy for teaching this sport. In our study, we taught a 13-year-old male diagnosed with autism to play basketball. During phase 1, we employed discrete-trial training to establish proficiency with nine fundamental basketball skills (i.e., recruiting attention, passing, dribbling, etc.). During phase 2, we used a forward chaining procedure to teach-specific sequences of these component skills that are appropriate for playing offense and defense and for participating in a full-court basketball drill. The participant learned all pre-requisite skills and response chains came under the control of contextually appropriate discriminative stimuli.
