| The unique learning styles of children with autism, including the tendency to be overselective, need to be considered when designing procedures to effectively and efficiently teach discriminations. When learning discriminations, overselective responding specifically can result in inappropriate skill acquisition. The constant time delay (CTD) teaching method (once children have been taught to respond to multiple cues) has been proven as an effective and efficient method for teaching discriminations to children with disabilities, including children with autism. Instructive feedback, which involves adding extra information after praising a child for correct responses, has been proven to be even more efficient and effective method than just response prompting procedures alone for many children with disabilities. This phenomenon has not yet been studied for children with autism exclusively and may provide different results due to children with autism's unique needs. The aim of this study is to compare the use of CTD alone with CTD with instructive feedback in teaching discriminations to children with autism. The procedures in this study, unlike past studies addressing instructive feedback, included the use of multiple exemplars and two cycles of learning and assessment of both maintenance of targets and generalization to novel stimuli. Results showed that both CTD clone and CTD with instructive feedback were effective in teaching the targeted discriminations with CTD with instructive feedback being more efficient for 2 of the 3 participants. In fact, these participants did not require any instruction for targets in the last training cycle as they had already learned the discrimination through instructive feedback. CTD with instructive feedback conditions generally produced the most error responses and higher generalization scores overall while CTD clone showed slightly higher maintenance scores. Implications for instruction and future research are discussed. |
