Stimulus characteristics within directives effects on accuracy of task completion

Three experiments were conducted in an outpatient setting with young childr en who had been referred for treatment of noncompliant behavior and who had coexisting receptive language or receptive vocabulary difficulties. Experi ment 1 studied differential responding of the participants to a brief hiera rchical directive analysis (least-to-most complex stimulus prompts) to iden tify directives that functioned as discriminative stimuli for accurate resp onding. Experiment 1 identified distinct patterns of accurate responding re lative to manipulation of directive stimulus characteristics. Experiment 2 demonstrated that directives identified as effective or ineffective in obta ining stimulus control of accurate responding during Experiment 1 continued to control accurate responding across play activities and academic tasks. Experiment 3 probed effects of the interaction between the type of directiv e (effective vs. ineffective) and the reinforcement contingency (differenti al reinforcement for attempts vs. differential reinforcement for accurate r esponses) on accurate task completion and disruptive behavior. Results sugg ested that behavioral escalation from inaccurate responding to disruptive b ehavior occurred only when ineffective directives were combined with differ ential reinforcement for accurate task completion. The overall results are discussed in terms of developing a methodology for identifying stimulus cha racteristics of directives that affect accurate responding.