Date of Award

4-2006

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. Wayne Fuqua

Second Advisor

Dr. Jim Carr

Third Advisor

Dr. Jack Michael

Keywords

teaching strategies

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Open Access

Abstract

Individuals with developmental disabilities were taught conditional discriminations in the form of an auditory visual matching to sample task using two teaching strategies: the increasing prompt hierarchy and the decreasing prompt hierarchy. A multielement design was used to compare these prompt hierarchies in terms of accuracy, rate of acquisition, number of errors, number of edible reinforcers, and number of praise statements delivered. The results indicate that the increasing prompt hierarchy consistently resulted in an increased number of steps, errors, edibles, and praise statements compared to the decreasing prompt hierarchy. However, differing results were obtained on the accuracy measure across participants. The results also suggest that better control of idiosyncratic factors is warranted for future research.

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