Using Video Modeling to Increase Face-Covering Behavior for Individuals with Down Syndrome in the School Setting

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the school environment for millions of students worldwide, which has resulted in the need to learn new behaviors, such as wearing face coverings. Teaching students with Down syndrome (DS) new COVID-19 prevention behaviors is essential. Individuals with DS are more likely to contract COVID-19, be hospitalized, and are ten times more likely to die from the disease than individuals without DS (Clift, Coupland, Keogh, Hemingway, & Hippisley-Cox, 2020; Malle et al., 2021). With the need to return students to in-person learning, educators have to quickly identify empirically based teaching tools to teach DS students to wear face coverings. Video modeling (VM) may be one tool that could efficiently teach students with DS to wear face coverings (Park et al., 2019). An intervention package, including VM, was evaluated within a non-concurrent multiple baseline across participants for increasing the time in which 3 participants with DS wore a face covering in the classroom. Results demonstrated that VM alone was an effective antecedent strategy to increase the duration of wearing a face covering for two students. The third participant required behavior specific praise targeting wearing a face covering in addition to VM.