Association for Behavior Analysis International

Amidst a global pandemic, service-delivery and education models must adapt to incorporate various instructional modalities and strategies. One increasingly common format of instruction is telehealth. This symposium features two different studies that were conducted via telehealth to teach learners with and without disabilities. The first presentation compared two different types of discriminative stimuli (i.e., single vs. varied) used within discrete trial teaching for individuals with autism. The second presentation compared a prompting and error-correction strategy (i.e., progressive time delay vs. response repetition) within discrete trial teaching for typically developing children. The symposium will conclude with a discussion on the strengths, limitations, and areas of future research for each study.

Those who provide supervision to staff implementing ABA-based interventions will benefit from this symposium, as well as staff who provide direct intervention. Information from this symposium will also be relevant to anyone involved in telehealth sessions for individuals with and without disabilities.

Many different instructional strategies have been used to teach sight words to students with and without disabilities. These instructional approaches often involve some form or prompting and/or error-correction procedure (Spector, 2011).Two particular strategies that have not been directly compared within the literature include progressive time delay (PTD) and response repetition (RR). This study compared progressive time delay to response repetition using an adapted alternating treatment design, replicated across sets for each participant. As part of the study, social validity was obtained from caregivers as well as child participants. Results will be reviewed with regards to participant responding, sessions to mastery, and efficiency of each instructional approach. Furthermore, limitations of the study as well as areas for future research will be discussed.

Various recommendations have been outlined for teaching individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder within a discrete trial format (Green, 2001; Grow & LeBlanc, 2013). One recommendation relates to how instructions are delivered at the beginning of a trial. This study aimed to closely examine some of these recommendations by comparing the use of a single instruction versus varied instructions when teaching three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) tact relations. The present investigation utilized an adapted alternating treatment design nested into a multiple probe design, to teach participants to label pictures of cartoon characters using either a single instruction or varied instructions. The goal of this study was to evaluate the acquisition, effectiveness, and efficiency of the two different procedures for each participant. Results of the study will be discussed as it relates to participant responding, sessions to mastery, and efficiency measures (e.g., number of teaching trials and duration of teaching). Future directions related to this topic will also be discussed.