Examination of efficacious, efficient, and socially valid error-correction procedures to teach sight words and prepositions to children with autism spectrum disorder

Assessing negative reinforcement through simultaneous observing and committed concurrent progressive-ratio procedures: Preliminary investigations

Efficient methods for assessing the relative aversiveness of stimuli are sparse and underresearched. Having access to efficient procedures that can identify aversive stimuli would benefit researchers and practitioners alike. Across three experiments, 13 participants helped to pilot, refine, and test two approaches to identifying negative reinforcers. The first experiment presented two conditions, one in which computerized button pressing started or stopped one of two recorded infant cries (or silence, when the control button was selected). Choices were presented either in a modified observing-response procedure (i.e., simultaneous observing) or in a modified progressive-ratio procedure (i.e., committed concurrent progressive ratio; CCPR). Results were favorable though not conclusive on their own. A second experiment, using more distinct stimuli (i.e., one likely aversive, one likely not aversive), replicated the first, and clearer results emerged. Finally, the third experiment tested the stimuli from the second experiment in a CCPR arrangement where sound was terminated contingent on responding and idiosyncratic negative reinforcement hierarchies emerged. The utility of these two procedures is discussed, and future work that addresses the limitations is outlined.

Characteristics of Missing Data in Single-Case Experimental Designs: An Investigation of Published Data

Single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) have grown in popularity in the fields such as education, psychology, medicine, and rehabilitation. Although SCEDs are valid experimental designs for determining evidence-based practices, they encounter some challenges in analyses of data. One of these challenges, missing data, is likely to be occurred frequently in SCEDs research due to repeated measurements over time. Since missing data is a critical factor that can weaken the validity and generalizability of a study, it is important to determine the characteristics of missing data in SCEDs, which are especially conducted with a small number of participants. In this regard, this study aimed to describe missing data features in SCEDs studies in detail. To accomplish this goal, 465 published SCEDs studies within the recent 5 years in six journals were included in the investigation. The overall results showed that the prevalence of missing data among SCEDs articles in at least one phase, as at least one data point, was approximately 30%. In addition, the results indicated that the missing data rates were above 10% within most studies where missing data occurred. Although missing data is so common in SCEDs research, only a handful of studies (5%) have handled missing data; however, their methods are traditional. In analyzing SCEDs data, several methods are proposed considering missing data ratios in the literature. Therefore, missing data rates determined in this study results can shed light on the analyses of SCEDs data with proper methods by improving the validity and generalizability of study results.

Simultaneous Prompting to Teach Initial Listener Responses to a Child with Down Syndrome

Simultaneous prompting procedures are infrequently published in the behavior analytic literature yet represent a potential method for promoting nearly errorless learning. No research on simultaneous prompting has targeted early skill repertoires for young children with developmental disabilities. The current study compared simultaneous prompting and constant prompt delay procedures on the acquisition of simple listener responses for a 4-year-old male with Down syndrome. Simultaneous prompting produced responding at mastery levels in less than one third of the total sessions required in the prompt delay condition and substantially fewer errors.

A Comparison of Telehealth-Based Instruction with or without Instructive Feedback

Language delays are commonly displayed by children on the autism spectrum. To help facilitate the development of verbal behavior, practitioners often implement intensive one-on-one, face-to-face instruction. However, the COVID-19 pandemic hindered typical face-to-face service delivery and caused practitioners to assess alternative approaches to facilitate clients' continued progress. Instructive feedback (IF) is one teaching strategy to enhance instruction or make it more efficient. During this teaching procedure, instructors provide formal teaching of target responses and embed demonstrations of secondary target responses within sequences of instruction. In the current study, we investigated the efficacy of IF provided within telehealth instruction. Four participants on the autism spectrum participated in the study. Participants received two forms of telehealth instruction that targeted speaker-responding. The first form consisted of discrete trial instruction (DTI), and the second form combined DTI with IF. These results indicate that both forms of instruction improved speaker-responding of primary targets for all participants. Additionally, a secondary analysis of secondary targets indicated that two of the four participants acquired some secondary targets. These results suggest that including IF within DTI might be beneficial for some participants receiving DTI via telehealth.

A Component Analysis of Skill Acquisition Consequences with Listener Responses

We conducted a component analysis of skill acquisition consequences for correct and incorrect responses. In the learn unit (LU) condition, researchers praised correct responses and implemented a correction procedure contingent on incorrect responses. In the praise-only-for-correct-responses (PC) condition, researchers delivered contingent praise for correct responses and ignored incorrect responses. In the correction-only-for-incorrect-responses (CI) condition, researchers ignored correct responses and implemented the correction procedure contingent on incorrect responses. We manipulated this independent variable across educational and abstract stimuli and measured acquisition rate, duration, and maintenance of responses. The results showed that the LU and the CI conditions were both effective in teaching listener responses and were more effective than the PC procedure. Furthermore, the LU instruction was not necessarily more efficient than the CI condition on acquisition of listener responses. The results suggested that the correction procedure may be necessary and sufficient for skill acquisition and maintenance.

Effects of stimulus disparity on acquisition of sight word sets: Manipulation of initial letter

Due to the prevalence of words that cannot be read phonetically in the English language, sight word instruction is required to supplement phonics instruction. In this study, we manipulated stimulus disparity in sight word sets by comparing the effects of sets of sight words with the same initial letter (3 words per set, 3 total sets) versus distributing words with the same initial letter across sets when assessing acquisition of the combined set (9 words) for 5 children who ranged from 4-6 years of age using a combined adapted alternating treatments design and pre-posttest design. All participants mastered the 3-word sets in both teaching conditions but did not master the control sets. In general, participants required more teaching sessions when the words in sets began with the same letter. These findings are consistent with stimulus disparity research demonstrating that discrimination training is generally less efficient when comparison stimuli are similar.

Adapting Direct Services for Telehealth: A Practical Tutorial

Due to the pandemic brought on by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), consumers of applied behavior-analytic interventions may be experiencing disrupted access to services. In response to the need for services, behavior analysts and therapists may find themselves treading unchartered waters as they use telehealth to provide direct intervention to consumers. Direct service provision via telehealth extends beyond the bounds of existing telehealth research, which primarily focuses on caregiver training and consultation. In the transition to telehealth, behavior analysts can consider how to adapt an existing evidence base of behavior-analytic strategies from a face-to-face format to intervention via a teleconferencing platform (i.e., Zoom). In this tutorial, we provide practice recommendations, task analyses, and a curated list of Zoom walk-throughs to help behavior analysts construct conceptually systematic learning opportunities in their direct telehealth services. Leveraging teleconferencing features to provide behavior-analytic intervention directly to consumers could spur future research to support these need-inspired practices and guide telehealth applications during and beyond the current pandemic.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40617-020-00529-5.

A Tutorial for the Design and Use of Assessment-Based Instruction in Practice

Assessment-based instruction can increase the efficacy and efficiency of skill acquisition by using learner data to select an intervention procedure from a comparison of potential interventions. Although there are many published examples of assessments that guide the selection of skill-acquisition procedures, there are limited resources available to practitioners to guide the development of assessments for use in practice. This article describes a sequence of steps that Board Certified Behavior Analysts can follow to design and use assessment-based instruction in practice. These steps include (a) pick a topic to evaluate, (b) identify interventions to include in the assessment, (c) identify target behavior, (d) select an experimental design, (e) select a skill and targets, (f) equate noncritical procedures across conditions, (g) design templates for data collection, (h) conduct the assessment, and (i) use assessment results to guide practice. Included in these steps are examples and materials for how to conduct components of assessment-based instruction.

Preference for Alternative Communication Modality Based on Reinforcer Quality and Availability

Preference for augmentative or alternative communication (AAC) systems has received growing interest in work with individuals with developmental disabilities. An individual may choose a modality based on technological (e.g., auditory-output) or aesthetic features of a system; however, it is ideal that functional features (i.e., effectiveness in producing a reinforcer) affect preference to a much greater extent. Prior research has treated preference as a static variable and may commonly report a lack of preference for a modality or control by irrelevant features of the assessment (e.g., position of the modality in an array). The current study assessed the preference for AAC modalities of a teenager with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability using a concurrent-chains procedure. This study extended prior research by including additional methods to ensure accurate assessment of preference (i.e., a control condition) and a reinforcer manipulation to determine whether preference was controlled by non-functional (e.g., aesthetic) or functional (i.e., reinforcer quality and availability) variables. Preference was found to be functionally related to reinforcer availability, including when rapidly alternated between modalities. Moreover, the participant consistently allocated responding away from the control condition. Implications for self-determination and suggestions for future research on preference for AAC systems are considered.

Effects of the Onset of Differential Reinforcer Quality on Skill Acquisition

Differential reinforcement of a target response is a necessary component of stimulus control transfer procedures. Recent research has further considered the timing (i.e., onset) of differential reinforcement of unprompted correct responding. To date, the onset of differential reinforcement has been inconsistently controlled in studies comparing skill acquisition programs for individuals with developmental disabilities. The current study serves as a systematic replication of prior comparative research to examine the effects of immediate and delayed differential reinforcement onset on the efficiency of acquisition for three individuals with developmental disabilities. The delayed onset of differential reinforcement required the fewest number of exposures to mastery per target across all comparisons. These findings failed to replicate those of prior research on differential reinforcement onset, possibly due to differences in participant characteristics, target tasks, or other required procedural modifications. Considerations for future research on differential reinforcement procedures in skill acquisition programs are described.

Replicating stimulus-presentation orders in discrimination training

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are taught conditional discriminations often during early intervention. Auditory-visual conditional discrimination (AVCD) training requires the presentation of multiple antecedent stimuli, and the order of stimulus presentation varies in the literature. This series of studies replicated previous literature on stimulus-presentation order in AVCD training. In Experiment 1, we compared sample-first and comparisons-first arrangements in 8 comparisons with 4 participants with ASD. For 3 participants, both presentations were efficacious. For 1 participant, the sample-first order was more likely to be efficacious. In Experiment 2, we added a sample-first-with-repetition arrangement and conducted 6 comparisons with 5 participants with ASD. Across comparisons, all 3 presentations were efficacious. Considerations for teaching AVCD to children with ASD and suggestions for further evaluation and examination of efficacy and efficiency are discussed.

Evaluating the use of programmed reinforcement in a correction procedure with children diagnosed with autism

BACKGROUND

Procedures that reduce errors while learning a repertoire play an important role in Applied Behavior Analysis for people with autism due to the detrimental effects that excessive exposure to error may have on learning. Previous studies have investigated the effects of correction procedures that require active student response after a trial with error. Some intervention manuals recommend against reinforcing responses after correction to prevent the establishment of prompt dependence. This study directly investigated the effect of reinforcement after an active-response correction procedure during tact training in four children with autism. An echoic-to-tact training procedure was used to train tacts. A "no reinforcement after correction" (NRC) condition was compared to a "reinforcement after correction" (RC) condition, using an adapted alternated treatments design.

RESULTS

All participants needed less correction trials in RC than in NRC, and considering all 26 sessions in which both training procedures were implemented, participants' performance was higher with RC than without in 17 sessions and was the same in 3 sessions.

CONCLUSIONS

We discuss the effectiveness of reinforcing correct responding after an active-response correction procedure, the absence of prompt dependence, and the implications of better correction procedures for applied settings.

The Role of Reinforcement in Multiple Response Repetition Error Correction and Treatment Preference of Chinese Children with Autism

Error correction is a ubiquitous instructional component for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the context of alternating treatment with repeated acquisition design, we taught four young Chinese children with ASD three sets of a match-to-sample task using multiple response repetition error correction with and without reinforcement. We assessed the participants' preferences of the procedures. Results showed that the acquisition rates were similar under both conditions. However, participant's preferences varied, with three participants preferring error correction with reinforcement and one preferring the without-reinforcement procedure. The discussion addresses the results from our comparison in light of prior studies and learner preferences of error-correction procedures, as well as the research and practical implications of our findings.

Effects of exposure to prompts on the acquisition of intraverbals in children with autism spectrum disorder

The current experiment is a systematic replication of previous studies that evaluated the efficiency of echoic and tact prompts on the acquisition of intraverbals (i.e., French-to-English translations) following exposure to each prompt type. We extended these studies by (a) evaluating participants' language skills on standardized assessments, (b) incorporating descriptive praise for correct responding, (c) presenting trials via voice recording, and (d) evaluating teacher preference for each prompt type as a social validity measure. All participants learned at least one set of intraverbals faster with the procedure that was most recently used during teaching. These findings suggest that results from previous prompt comparison studies might be a function of previous exposure to prompt types and that it might be possible to manipulate learning histories such that a particular prompt type becomes more efficient.

A comparison of methods to teach foreign-language targets to young children

Using instructional strategies based on derived relational responding (DRR) to teach foreign-language targets may result in emergent, untrained foreign-language relations. One benefit of using DRR instructional strategies is the efficiency with which an individual acquires additional stimulus relations as a result of emergent responding following acquisition of one or a small number of relations. In the current study, we compared the efficiency of tact training alone to a traditional foreign-language teaching strategy (i.e., teaching all relations concurrently-mixed training) with four, 4-year-old children. The results demonstrated that tact training was more efficient than mixed training for 5 of 7 stimulus sets. The findings add to the research demonstrating that DRR instructional strategies, specifically tact training, may be more efficient than concurrently teaching all targeted relations.

Baseline reinforcement rate and resurgence of destructive behavior

Concepts from behavioral momentum theory, along with some empirical findings, suggest that the rate of baseline reinforcement may contribute to the relapse of severe destructive behavior. With seven children who engaged in destructive behavior, we tested this hypothesis in the context of functional communication training by comparing the effects of different baseline reinforcement rates on resurgence during a treatment challenge (i.e., extinction). We observed convincing resurgence of destructive behavior in four of seven participants, and we observed more resurgence in the condition associated with high-rate baseline reinforcement (i.e., variable-interval 2 s in Experiment 1 or fixed-ratio 1 in Experiment 2) compared to a low-rate baseline reinforcement condition. We discuss the implications of these results relative to schedules of reinforcement in the treatment of destructive behavior and strategies to mitigate resurgence in clinical settings.

A comparison of blocked and mixed-trial methods for teaching auditory-visual discriminations

Behavior analysts typically teach conditional discriminations in a mixed-trial format but may switch to a blocked-trial format for learners displaying limited acquisition. No known research has shown that mixed-trial methods are more effective or efficient than blocked-trial methods for teaching discriminations, so it is not clear why this format has been adopted as the "first-line" intervention. We compared blocked and mixed-trial formats for teaching novel auditory-visual discriminations to three adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). Results show blocked-trial methods resulted in faster skill acquisition in all cases, suggesting this format may be a preferable starting point for instruction.

Comparison of task interspersal ratios on efficiency of learning and problem behavior for children with autism spectrum disorder

The current study extends the literature on task interspersal (TI) by comparing the effects of four different TI ratios on the efficiency of skill acquisition and on levels of problem behavior in children with autism spectrum disorder and related disorders. The four ratios of TI were 3:1, 1:1, 1:3, and 0:1 mastered-to-acquisition tasks. An adapted alternating treatments design was implemented to compare the cumulative number of stimuli mastered, mean training time to mastery, rate of acquisition, and the level of problem behavior. The results showed that the 0:1 condition was the most efficient intervention procedure for all four participants. In addition, TI did not lead to a greater reduction in levels of problem behavior.

A review of error correction procedures during instruction for children with developmental disabilities

Error correction procedures are remedial strategies presented following an incorrect response that increases the probability that a correct response will occur in the future. Error correction is commonly used during skill acquisition programs for children with developmental disabilities; however, the specific strategy used may differ considerably. Recent comparative studies have examined the effect of numerous error correction procedures on the efficiency of acquisition for children with developmental disabilities. Despite considerable merit, minor procedural differences and unique terms for similar procedures likely affect comparisons across studies. Here, we clarify the procedures and findings of these studies and suggest areas of future research.

Comparing procedures on the acquisition and generalization of tacts for children with autism spectrum disorder

Generalization is a critical outcome for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who display new skills in a limited range of contexts. In the absence of proper planning, generalization may not be observed. The purpose of the current study was to directly compare serial to concurrent multiple exemplar training using total training time per exemplar, mean total training time, and exposures to mastery across three children diagnosed with ASD. Additionally, we assessed the efficiency of presenting secondary targets in the antecedent and consequence portions of learning trials and evaluated generalization to tacts not associated with direct teaching. Results suggested that all training conditions produced acquisition and generalization for trained and untrained exemplars. However, the serial multiple exemplar training condition was more efficient for two participants, whereas the instructive feedback condition was the most efficient for the third. Findings are discussed considering previous studies and areas for future research.

Using an abbreviated assessment to identify effective error-correction procedures for individual learners during discrete-trial instruction

Previous research comparing the effectiveness of error-correction procedures has involved lengthy assessments that may not be practical in applied settings. We used an abbreviated assessment to compare the effectiveness of five error-correction procedures for four children with autism spectrum disorder or a developmental delay. During the abbreviated assessment, we sampled participants' responding with each procedure and completed the assessment before participants reached our mastery criterion. Then, we used the results of the abbreviated assessment to predict the most efficient procedure for each participant. Next, we conducted validation assessments, comparing the number of sessions, trials, and time required for participants to master targets with each procedure. Results showed correspondence between the abbreviated assessment and validation assessments for two of four participants and partial correspondence for the other two participants. Findings suggest that a brief assessment may be a useful tool for identifying the most efficient error-correction procedure for individual learners.