Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in intervention-based assessment to promote and enhance children's learning. In this study, we explored the potential effect of an experimental visual-spatial intervention procedure and possible training benefits of two prompting modalities: one group received training with verbal and visual…

The study investigated relationships between type of prompt and type of task by teaching 32 mentally retarded adults two tasks (visual discrimination and a motoric assembly task) using two types of prompts (gestural and physical guidance). Results failed to support either the traditional response prompts hierarchy or the existence of a prompt-task…

A color coded "extra prompt" procedure was compared to a "no extra prompt" procedure in teaching 20 autistic children and adolescents how to lace shoes. (Author/SB)

Four methods for response prompting and fading are reviewed: increasing assistance, decreasing assistance, graduated guidance, and time delay. Comparative investigations involving these methods are discussed, and recommendations for practitioners and for future research are included. (Author/JDD)

This study evaluated the effectiveness of combining two training procedures (task-size fading and automatic prompting) in increasing the unsupervised responding of two adult subjects with severe/profound mental retardation. Results suggest the effectiveness of this combination of training methods. (DB)

Four students (ages 10-14) with moderate mental retardation learned chained tasks with constant time delay and with the system of least prompts. Both strategies produced criterion-level performance; however, constant time delay was more efficient than least prompts in terms of number of sessions, percent of errors, and direct instructional time to…

Two methods of prompting were compared for their relative effectiveness in teaching a group of autistic students, age 12-20, to discriminate line drawings used in picture communication books. Students required fewer trials to criterion and made significantly fewer errors in the delayed-prompting technique compared to the fading-of-prompts design.…

Comparison of two strategies for reducing drooling in two adults with moderate mental retardation found both the use of brief cues and the use of flexible cues equally effective for Subject 1 but the use of flexible cues more reliably effective with Subject 2. Neither subject achieved independent skill without the use of cues. (DB)

A study assessed the efficacy of a written script/cue card program to teach conversational speech skills to three verbal, literate boys (ages 8-10) with autism. Initially boys demonstrated low frequencies of conversational speech. Following intervention, all three quickly met the training criteria and maintained correct responding without cue…

Three mentally handicapped students (aged 13, 36, and 40) with maladaptive speech received training to answer questions with verbal labels. The results of their cues-pause-point training showed that the students replaced their maladaptive speech with correct labels (answers) to questions in the training setting and three generalization settings.…

This paper discusses guidelines for devising a hierarchy when fading response prompts in training individuals with developmental disabilities. Existing guidelines are seen as poorly defined, inconsistent, and lacking both theoretical and experimental support. An alternative theoretical account is proposed which suggests that prompts in a hierarchy…

Six retarded young adults were trained to select grocery items using picture cards as cues and to reject either (1) maximally different negative examples or (2) minimally different negative examples. Training with minimally different negative examples was functionally related to improved rejection of nontrained negative items in a nontrained…

Tactile cues were provided to a 19-year-old deaf, blind, and mentally retarded individual to guide her performance on packaging tasks. The tactile prompts effectively guided her on the training task and were also generalized to novel tasks and cues. Continued use of the cues was necessary to maintain performance. (Author/JDD)

This study found that delivering data cards to three special education teacher aides prompting them to conduct daily social-greeting probes of students with severe disabilities was effective in increasing the level of probing and was accompanied by less variability, higher sustained probing rates, and more equitable probing compared to not using…

Because many textbooks contain sparse headings or no headings at all, the effectiveness of having students generate their own headings while studying material from an introductory biology text was investigated. General psychology students (N=51) were randomly assigned to three groups: (1) Headings Generation, given instructions on creating a…