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A Comparison of Constant Time Delay Instruction with High and Low Treatment Integrity.

2011; EDAM-Education Consultancy Limited; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2148-7561

Elif Tekin‐Iftar, Onur Kurt, Özlem Şimşek Çetin,

Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills

Abstract Time delay (TD) procedure is an effective procedure in teaching various skills to children with developmental disabilities. Moreover, research has shown that it is used with high treatment integrity (HTI). However, there are several barriers which may prevent to deliver instruction with HTI. Therefore, this study was designed to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of TD instruction with HTI and low treatment integrity (LTI) in teaching object naming to children with autism. LTI was defined as not delivering prompt 30% of all teaching trials. An adapted alternating treatments design was used in the study. Three 5 to 6 year old male students participated in the study. Results showed that all three children learned their target behaviors on the criterion level with both conditions. Mixed findings were obtained for the efficiency of instruction. Based upon evaluation of the findings, recommendations for practitioners are provided and future research needs are discussed. Key Words Time Delay Procedure, Treatment Integrity, Autism. Time delay instruction was first used by Touchette (1971) to teach discrimination skills to adolescents with mental retardation. In time delay instruction, prompt is provided followed by task direction so students are expected to respond to the task direction correctly. It is one of the errorless learning procedures. The rationale of do not learn from their errors but from positive practices is basically important while developing errorless learning procedures (Wolery, Bailey, & Sugai, 1988, p. 220). Response prompting procedure and stimulus modifications are the two main types of errorless learning procedures (Tekin-Iftar & Kircaali-Iftar, 2006). In response prompting procedures, the prompt is provided prior to students' response and they are expected to respond correctly whereas in stimulus modification procedures, prompt is provided to the stimuli and the students are expected to recognize the stimuli and give correct response. There are many different procedures in both response prompting and stimulus modification approaches. Constant and progressive time delay procedures are two types of time delay procedures. Fixed amount of time such as 4 or 5 s is inserted between task direction and prompt in time delay. The duration between task direction and prompt is called delay interval. The interval is used for giving the student a chance to respond independently. In progressive time delay procedure, the delay interval is progressively increased. Both procedures have been developed by using one of the main principles of applied behavior analysis which is known as ABC principle. The procedural characteristics of time delay procedure (CTD) can be explained as follows: (a) same prompt is used throughout the instruction, (b) task direction is used in its final form, (c) it requires two types of teacher behaviors known as 0 s delay interval trials and constant time delay intervals, (d) five types of student responses are possible during instruction. After the first published study mentioned above, in the following four decades many research studies have been conducted to examine the effectiveness of CTD, to compare CTD with other procedures in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, to investigate the use of CTD by paraprofessionals, peers, and siblings. These published studies have shown that CTD is an effective procedure in teaching discrete as well as chained skills to individuals with various disabilities and ages. CTD is successfully used for teaching discrete skills such as sight words (Gast, Ault, Wolery, Doyle, & Belanger, 1988), mathematical skills (Kircaali- Iftar, Ergenekon, & Uysal, 2008; Koscinski & Gast, 1993), community signs (Yildirim & Tekin-Iftar, 2002) and chained skills such as food and drink preparation (Bozkurt & Gursel, 2005; Fiscus, Schuster, Morse, & Collins, 2002; Graves, Collins, Schuster, & Kleinhert, 2005; Hall, Schuster, Wolery, Gast, & Doyle, 1992; Schuster, Gast, Wolery, & Gultinan, 1988; Schuster & Griffen, 1991); responding to the lures of strangers (Collins, Schuster, & Nelson, 1992; Gast, Collins, Wolery, & Jones, 1993), first-aid skills (Gast, Winterling, Wolery, & Farmer, 1992), shopping skills (Dippi-Hoy & Jitendra, 2004; Morse & Schuster, 2000), and leisure skills (Tekin- Iftar et al. …