The Role of Procedural Integrity

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of staff video self-monitoring (SM) training on the accuracy of delivering Discrete Trial Instruction (DTI) to students enrolled in a classroom for children with autism. Staff were trained to self-monitor a five-step DTI trial: (a) delivery of discriminative stimulus, (b) wait time for student response, (c) response-specific feedback, (d) immediacy of specific feedback, and (e) latency before delivery of next discriminative stimulus. The dependent measure was the accuracy of completing the five-step trial. Prior to intervention, staff were trained to criteria using videotapes of their teaching in scoring their DTI delivery. A multiple baseline design across staff was used to evaluate the effectiveness of SM. Results showed that video self-monitoring and self-evaluation increased the accuracy of DTI and, more specifically, the accuracy of managing the intertrial interval.

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