The effects of hand-over-hand and a dot-to-dot tracing procedure on teaching an autistic student to write his name

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of hand-over-hand and dot-to-dot tracing procedure to teach a 14-year-old student with autism to write his first name. The participant began the study unable to write any letters in his name. Instead, he used a name stamp when his name needed to be applied to a document in school. When asked to write a letter or word, the student would simply draw a vertical or horizontal line. A multiple baseline and reversal design was used to evaluate hand-over-hand and dot-to-dot tracing. The results indicated the participant increased his ability to write the letters in his first name "T," "y," and "e," from 60% to 100 %. The study was cost effective since it required only small amounts of additional time to complete, and should be easily replicable in other classroom settings.