When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decided to try his hand at writing detective stories, he was determined that chance would play little or no role in the solution of the crime. Sherlock Holmes would reason his way to the answer using both old and new forensic methods. In this way Holmes and Watson are presented as men of science. Even their conversation is on a lofty scientific level. When reading Sherlock Holmes, be prepared to hear about conic sections and surds and the 5th proposition of Euclid. Fear not however, much of the science is used just to set the mood of the story. But Holmes does solve a number of his cases using scientifically based forensic methods. He truly is the first scientific detective in fiction.
incidental teaching as a way to increase peer interactions by children with ASD (McGee, Almeida, Sulzer-Azaroff, and Feldman, 1992). The study gave a typical child something to say that would elicit a response from their peer with ASD (McGee et al., 1992). Three typical preschoolers were trained and paired with three children with ASD in a natural free play environment (McGee et al., 1992). There was adult supervision that was systematically faded throughout the sessions, which resulted in increase reciprocal interactions among the peers (McGee et al., 1992). Evidence showed that peer incidental teaching was effective in improving and enhancing reciprocal interactions among children with autism and their typical peers (McGee et al., 1992).
Expansion of Incidental Teaching Methods
Incidental teaching is the most common among speech and verbal words and phrases. It is proven to help a child engage with toys, respond in social settings, social tolerance of peers, and imitation of peers (McGee et al., 1999). Hart and Risley (1975) discussed that children were able to develop compound sentences on their own based on the teaching procedures of incidental teaching. Incidental teaching encourages the use of conversational language because of the use in generalized settings with different people (McGee & Daly, 2007).
It is evident how successful incidental teaching is in the realm of functional language interactions. However, McGee, Krantz, and McClannahan (1986) completed an extension of incidental teaching procedures of Hart and Risley (1975) to teach reading instruction for autistic children. The study consisted of two autistic children, one who was five years old, and another who was thirteen years old (McGee et al., 1986). The study used visual discriminations of printed stimuli in response to auditory cues within the activity and the measurements were based on maintenance of sight-word reading skills, generalizations of visual discriminations to a reading understanding task, and a transfer of stimulus materials and response modes (McGee et al., 1986)
