COMPARISON OF PROGRESSIVE TIME-DELAY AND TRANSITION-BASED TEACHING WITH PRESCHOOLERS WHO HAVE DEVELOPMENTAL DELAYS

A progressive time delay procedure in one-to-one instructional session s using massed-trial Presentation was compared to transition-based tea ching that involved distributed trials presented during transitions fr om one activity to another. Four preschool children with developmental delays were taught to read words and name letters/numerals and to pro duce manual signs for photographs. The classroom teacher conducted one daily massed-trial session with each student using progressive time d elay for a set of behaviors, and provided an equal number of distribut ed trials at transition times to each student with a transition-based teaching procedure for another set of behaviors. The procedures were c ompared on the number of children meeting criterion (effectiveness) an d on the number of trials and errors to criterion and the percentage o f errors to criterion (efficiency). The parallel treatments design was used to evaluate the two instructional strategies. The results indica ted that (a) both procedures were implemented reliably, (b) both proce dures were effective in establishing criterion level performance, and (c) no substantial differences existed on the efficiency measures, alt hough the number and percentage of errors were slightly higher for 3 o f the 4 children with the transition-based teaching procedure. Implica tions for practice and future research are described