Students with autism have deficits in daily living skills which may seriously limit their participation in domestic and personal routines, which may, in turn, reduce their overall life quality and satisfaction ( Flynn & Healy 2012). For special education teachers and researchers, one major purpose of instruction and research is to help these students develop functional skills in community-based environments (Rowe et al., 2021). Therefore, there is a vital need to establish and evaluate teaching strategies that improve independent living skills of children with autism. 

       Among a set of living skills, purchasing skills are critical in daily life for middle school students with autism as they are making the transition to real world. Generally speaking, students with autism have poor performance in daily communication (Steinbrenner et al., 2020), However, for regular checkouts, the procedure involves conversation between a cashier and a shopper (greeting, asking payment method, etc.), which may be difficult for students with autism who have limited communication skills to complete. While by using self-checkout machine, they may forego communication opportunities and directly check out items by themselves. In addition, individuals with autism are commonly characterized with having difficulties understanding, recalling and using verbal information (Touchett, M. 2023).  Evidence showed that students with autism are able to process visual supports more easily than auditory stimuli (Thérien et al., 2023). Picture activity schedule which utilizes a series of pictures to depict different steps of a task helped students with autism perform tasks independently. This teaching method was successfully used to teach a set of living skills for students with disabilities including students with autism such as game playing skills (Brodhead et al., 2014), shopping skills (Burckley et al., 2015), tooth brushing skills (Moran et al., 2022),   ipad use (Chan et al., 2014), transition skills(Matsushita & Sonoyama, 2013) and has been demonstrated to improve generalization (Pierce & Schreibman, 1994). Picture activity schedules eliminate reliance on adult prompting and allow for independence, and therefore may be useful for improving independent purchasing skills for students with autism.  

      Within the field of special education, research on independent purchasing skills has primarily focused on teaching essential money skills. That is, students are provided with cash to make independent purchases.With the development of mobile technology, mobile payment is becoming a common and convenient way for people to pay when make purchases. In addition, a self-checkouts system is becoming more prominent in the retail industry, especially in supermarkets, but there is few research focusing on using mobile payment to make purchases through self-checkout system for students with disabilities, not mention to students with autism.

Given little research on teaching purchasing skills for  using mobile payment through self-checkout system to middle school students with autism, the charateristics of students with autism, and the evidence of the benefits of picture activity schedule for students with autism,  the purpose of the current study is to investigate the use of picture schedule delivered by an iPhone to teach self-checkout skills in the community-based grocery store to three middle school students with autism. Maintenance and generalization were  also assessed for this study. The study's two research questions are as follows:

(a) What are the effects of the iPhone-based picture activity schedule on participating students' self-checkout purchasing performance as measured by a purchasing task analysis?

(b) Will participating students maintain the acquired self-checkout skills following the termination of the intervention?

Experimental Design A multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the functional relationship between the intervention and participants’ self-checkout performance. Participants Three students who have diagnosed with autism between the ages of 13 and 15 participated in the study. Participants were selected in accordance with the prerequisite skills(McClannahan & Krantz, 2010) for activity schedules. Materials and Settings The iPhone-based activity schedule was created through the application “Book Creator” and was used to provide cues for each step of the task analysis. Data were collected in a local supermarket “Yonghui” which is a chain supermarket in China. All sessions were video-taped. Dependent Measure is the percentage of steps in the purchasing task analysis independently completed without any prompts. Measurement After each session, the researcher scored each participant’s independence level of self-checkout. Students needed to follow the sequence of the task table. If a student does not respond correctly, the researcher would provide physical prompt 5 seconds after the previously completed step. Only unprompted correct responses were marked as correct. Procedures Preference assessment. Before baseline, the researcher conducted a survey regarding the items participants’ parents would like them to buy. Baseline. Students were required to select one item to checkout. No prompts or instruction were provided to participants. Schedule probe was to measure whether participants would follow the picture schedules without additional instruction.The iPhone-based activity schedule was available, but no prompts were provided. Intervention. The study used graduated guidance to teach the appropriate sequence of the independent purchasing behaviors. Physical and vocal promoting were used to teach the skills. The researcher opened the activity schedule and said “Let’s check out this item”. Then, a participant held the iPhone by himself and the researcher physically and vocally prompt the participant to complete each step. The session ended when each participant turned to the final page. As the participant learned the correct responses, the researcher carefully reduced the physical and vocal prompts. If the participant does not respond the schedule within 5s or make an error, the researcher used error correction procedure to return to the previous prompting procedure with full, hand-over-hand physical guidance. No-schedule probe. This phase was identical to the baseline. The purpose was to measure responding in the absence of the activity schedules. This phase was served as a reversal within the design. Generalization phase was to see if students could generate the obtained skills to a new Supermarket.

A visual analysis was conducted to evaluate the quantitative information of the graph focusing on the trend, variability, level, consistence of data patterns, the immediacy of effect and the overlap. The percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) was used to calculate the effect size of intervention. A functional relationship was found between participants’ intervention and performance on self-checkout tasks. For all participants, appropriate self-checkout behavior did not occur during baselines or schedule sessions as they scored below 10% correct. Instead, participants engaged in off-task behaviors. For example, one participant kept staring at the red light through the item scanner, while another two participants randomly tapped the screen of the checkout machine. However, with the introduction of the iPhone-based activity schedule and the graduated guidance and vocal prompting, all participants’ performance immediately increased from 0%-10% correct during baseline to 60%-70% correct during the initial testing session of the intervention. Over the following sessions of the intervention, all students’ correct responses increased gradually and eventually achieved 100% correct on the fifth or sixth sessions. The PND was 100% for all participants and the mean correct responses were above 85% during the intervention. During the post-intervention, participants achieved 100%, 90%, 80% correct respectively. For the novel location phase, median correct response was 90% for all participants. The second observer scored 30% of the videotaped sessions independently. The interrater reliability for the study was 100% and the overall treatment fidelity was 99%. The study extends the research on activity schedules by demonstrating that it could be integrated with a mobile phone to promote self-checkout purchasing skills for students with autism. With the development of technology, phone-based activity schedule could be considered as a type of permanent support for students with autism in the community to improve their independent living skills and the quality of life.

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