Working with elementary students with disabilities, we used alternating treatment designs to evaluate and compare the effects of 2 computer-based flash card sight-word reading interventions, 1 with 1-s response intervals and another with 5-s response intervals. In Study 1, we held instructional time constant, applying both interventions for 3 min. Although students completed 6 learning trials per word during each 1-s session and 2 trials per word during each 5-s session, results showed similar acquisition rates for 1-s and 5-s words. During Study 2, we held learning trials constant (3 per word) and allowed instructional time to vary. When we measured learning using cumulative instructional sessions, the interventions appeared to cause similar increases in acquisition rates. When the same learning data were measured and plotted using cumulative instructional seconds, all participants showed greater learning rates under the 1-s intervention. Discussion focuses on how measurement scales can influence comparative effectiveness studies.
Classrooms are complex environments, and students can choose to engage in a variety of behaviors, including desired academic and social behaviors, and undesired disruptive and passive (e.g., staring out the window) behaviors. Contingencies applied to student behavior in classroom environments have been shown to impact students' allocation of time to these competing behaviors (e.g., Heering & Wilder, 2006). These contingencies include individual and group-oriented contingencies. In this chapter, contingency components are described, strengths and weakness of different types of contingencies are analyzed, and recommendations for classroom applications of group-oriented contingencies are provided.
CONTINGENCY COMPONENTSContingencies describe an if-then environment-behavior relationship. If, under certain environmental conditions (antecedent conditions or stimuli), the student exhibits a behavior (target behavior) to criterion (goal), then the environment (e.g., a teacher, peer, computer) will respond with another
A concurrent multiple-baseline across-tasks design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a computer flash-card sight-word recognition intervention with elementary-school students with intellectual disability. This intervention allowed the participants to self-determine each response interval and resulted in both participants acquiring previously unknown words across all word sets. Discussion focuses on the need to evaluate and compare computer flash-card sight-word recognition interventions with fixed and self-determined response intervals across students and dependent variables, including rates of inappropriate behavior and self-determination in students with intellectual disability. (PsycINFO Database Record
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