Preferred Name
Matthew Taylor
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Spring 2017
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Department of Graduate Psychology
Advisor(s)
Daniel D. Holt
Trevor Stokes
Tracy Zinn
Abstract
Behavior Skills Training (BST) has been a common, efficient, and successful training strategy for teaching individuals to perform discrete trial teaching (DTT) although there is not much established information about the separate effects of its training components. Research on modeling and feedback alone as well as within BST, however, suggest that they may be the most significant contributors towards producing behavior change along with the regular recommendation that feedback is best delivered immediately after the occurrence of target behavior for reinforcement. Yet studies that have employed feedback before the occurrence of target behavior have observed no adverse or detrimental effects in the acquisition or performance of skills that were trained, which may indicate a misleading protocol for the timing of feedback delivery. In an effort to extend research on feedback timing as well as its role within BST and effectiveness in training DTT, BST was utilized to teach participants to perform discrete trial teaching (DTT) while Performance Feedback was delivered only before, after, or before and after DTT sessions towards reaching mastery criteria. The results support the role of feedback in behavior change as serving a more discriminative, rather than reinforcing, function to allow for much more efficient, effective, and productive training interventions for the serious level of need in proficient human service providers.
Recommended Citation
Taylor, Matthew, "Feedback delivery timing & behavior skills training: Training university students to perform DTT" (2017). Masters Theses, 2010-2019. 510.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/master201019/510
