Matching training procedures to outcomes. A behavioral and quantitative analysis.

To analyze the effects of matching the prompting procedure used in training to the specific behavior chain to be taught, 3 students with mild to moderate retardation were taught four independent tasks: making a bagged lunch, playing a matching game with a peer, ordering food at a restaurant, and participating in a social conversation. Following baseline, all 3 students were exposed to one of two types of training procedures for each task: a least-to-most prompting procedure or a most-to-least prompting procedure. The type of training procedure was counter-balanced across students and tasks, whereas performance on the tasks was evaluated within a combination of a multiple-baseline design across participants and multiple-probe design across tasks. When the method of prompting was matched to the naturally occurring discriminative stimulus (SD) of the training stimulus, it greatly affected acquisition and maintenance of the skill in terms of differences in levels of and variability of performance. The most-to-least method of prompting, the matched method in these cases, was more efficient and effective for acquisition and generalization of the bagged-lunch and matching-game skills. The least-to-most method, the matched method in these cases, was more efficient and effective for social questions and ordering-food skills.