REEVALUATION OF A PROGRAMMED METHOD TO TEACH GENERALIZED IDENTITY MATCHING-TO-SAMPLE

Programmed training in identity matching to sample was given to six pa rticipants who had severe mental retardation, mental age-equivalent sc ores of 3.0 years oi less, and histories of failures in prior assessme nts and training attempts with standard procedures. An intermediate go al of the training program was to establish one-trial discrimination l earning (OTDL), where new discriminations are acquired after a single training trial. OTDL was included because an analysis of the task requ irements for identity matching suggested that it could be a prerequisi te skill. One participant was eliminated from the experiment when stim ulus control by prompting procedures broke down relatively early in tr aining. Only one of the the remaining participants achieved OTDL. When the program was modified to eliminate OTDL as an intermediate goal, f our participants completed it and passed tests Sol generalized identit y matching with high accuracy scores. The program was partially succes sful with the sixth participant in that it established highly accurate and reliable identity matching when different stimuli were displayed on every trial (nonconditional-function matching), but not when the sa me set of comparison stimuli was displayed on every trial (conditional -function matching). The results showed that (a) one-trial discriminat ion learning appears to be sufficient but not necessary for identity m atching, and (b) the program successfully established identity matchin g in a majority of difficult-to-teach students who had well-documented failures to learn by standard teaching methods.