Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that impacts an individual’s behavior, social, and communication skills (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). A common approach to teach socially significant behaviors to individuals with ASD is applied behavior analysis, which utilizes reinforcement to increase the chances of behaviors occurring again. Research typically suggests that when teaching children with ASD new skills, descriptive praise will lead to faster acquisition and mastery compared to using general praise. However, previous studies comparing using the two types of praise have demonstrated mixed findings regarding which one leads to faster acquisition of skills. The purpose of current study is to extend research conducted by Polick and colleagues (2012) by examining the use of general praise, descriptive praise, and irrelevant statements in teaching 1 young child with ASD intraverbal behavior. An adapted alternating treatment design embedded within a multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to teach the participant to respond to simple “what” questions. The results showed that sets assigned to descriptive praise condition met mastery criteria first. However, the difference between mastery of descriptive praise sets and the other sets were small. Future research is needed to fully understand the correlation between descriptive praise and acquisition speed of learning new skills for children with ASD.
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