Comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of two response prompting procedures delivered by sibling tutors

Abstract

We used a parallel treatments design to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of a 4 s constant time delay and a simultaneous prompting procedure on teaching receptively identifying animals to children with mild and moderate mental retardation. The study had two purposes: (1) to determine if sibling tutors use these two instructional procedures reliably for instructing their younger siblings with mental retardation, and (2) to asses any differences between these two instructional procedures in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Three children with mental retardation and their siblings who were trained as tutors participated. The two procedures were delivered alternately by tutor siblings. Results show that both procedures were effective in teaching receptively identifying animals to the children with mental retardation. Efficiency data showed that the differences between two procedures were minimal. Maintenance data collected 1, 4, and 5 weeks after training indicated no difference between the two procedures. Men generalization data for the two instructional procedures across all sibling tutees were compared, stimuli taught with the constant time delay procedure resulted in higher levels of generalization for all sibling tutees. In conclusion, (a) both procedures were implemented reliably by all typical sibling tutors, (b) both procedures were effective on teaching receptively identifying animals, (c) simultaneous prompting was more efficient than constant time delay in terms of the number of training errors and training time through criterion, (d) no differences were evident based on maintenance data, and (e) constant time delay resulted in more generalization. Future research is needed to support these findings.