Using Video Prompting with Embedded Safety Checks to Teach Child Passenger Safety Restraint Skills to Caregivers

Are you a caregiver or service provider to a family who uses car seats to transport their child? Did you know that despite the importance of correct car seat installation, Bachman et al. (2016) found that 96% of inspected car seats were installed incorrectly? In this article Zonnefeld et al. explored how video tutorials (video prompting) with safety checks affected the installation and harnessing skills of four expecting parents and caregivers. 

Video Prompting

Video prompting is when a skill is broken down into steps and a recording of each step is shown to the learner. The learner watches a video of the step, performs the step, and then moves onto the next video in the sequence. These steps are repeated until the entire skill has been performed. One of the challenges of this approach is that if there is no instructor present and the learner makes a mistake, there is nothing stopping them from continuing while performing the skill incorrectly. 

Built-in Safety Checks

The authors of this article wanted to explore how video prompting with built-in safety checks for key steps (voiceover/text on screen reminding the parent/caregiver to perform a key step) would affect how parents/caregivers would install and use a car seat when an instructor was not present to give feedback. Participants were trained on how to interact with the video on a tablet, and their sessions were recorded for analysis.

What did they find?

The authors results suggest that video prompting with built-in safety checks is an effective intervention for teaching prospective parents and caregivers to properly install and harness children into car seats when an instructor is not providing corrective feedback. All 4 parents demonstrated an immediate improvement in skill performance compared to baseline and reached mastery criterion for target skills (installation of the seat and harnessing of a doll) within 9 sessions which was comparable to those obtained with researcher‐delivered training (Giannakakos et al., 2018; Himle & Wright, 2014). These results suggest that once a training video with embedded safety checks is developed for a target skill, it may be possible to produce robust results without requiring an instructor to be present.

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References

Giannakakos, A. R. , Vladescu, J. C. , & Simon, R. (2018). Teaching installation and use of child passenger safety restraints. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 51(4), 915–923. 10.1002/jaba.493

Himle, M. B. , & Wright, K. A. (2014). Behavioral skills training to improve installation and use of child passenger safety restraints. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 47(3), 549–559. 10.1002/jaba.143

Zonneveld, K. L. M., Rasuratnam, N., & Vladescu, J. C. (2025). The influence of video prompting with 

embedded safety checks to teach child passenger safety restraint skills. Journal of applied behavior analysis, 58(2), 433–451. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.70002