‘Hurry Up!’ Using Timer Interventions to Reduce Latency of Transitions for Preschool Students

Preschool settings are the first educational experience for many children. Expectations may be different compared to what was previously experienced at home, potentially leading to difficult classroom behaviors. For example, a student may be asked to finish a preferred activity (e.g., snack) and then transition to a less-preferred activity (e.g., naptime), but not be used to these expectations. To prevent misbehaviors, antecedent interventions can be utilized. Antecedent interventions are those interventions that precede the difficult behavior in question and are not contingent on that behavior (Cooper et al., 2019). Temporal warnings are an antecedent intervention that can prime students for a change within the environment and are often utilized within a larger intervention package (Aspiranti et al., 2019). For example, students are given a verbal warning that a transition will occur soon. This method can be used in preschools; however, a preschool age child’s ability to understand what it means to transition “in five minutes” is limited by their ability to conceive of the idea of time.