Autistic children: a study of learning characteristics and programming needs.

Learning-acquisition characteristics of six autistic children were studied in order to examine programming needs. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 showed that the first step of a color-cued sequencing task required four times more trials to learn than did the remaining five steps, producing a significant learning-to-learn curve. Study 2 confirmed earlier findings that extra-stimulus prompts are comparatively ineffective with autistic children when compared to within-stimulus prompts and showed extra-stimulus prompting to be effective following the use of within-stimulus prompting on a similar task.