A rejoinder to Leaf: What constitutes efficient, applied, and trial and error

In my response to Leaf (2011 Leaf, JB. (2011). An experimental approach for selecting a response-prompting strategy for children with developmental disabilities: A reply to Gast. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention, 5, 226–233 [Google Scholar]), we agree that more comparative studies on response prompting procedures need to be conducted, and that it is “hard to justify the use of any trial and error procedure”. There appears to be disagreement, however, on several points, including: a) the need to separate the discussion of a procedure's effectiveness and efficiency; b) what constitutes an applied or functional skill; c) that NNP is a trial and error procedure; d) the importance of researchers explicitly reporting multiple measures of efficiency so that readers can independently evaluate the efficiency of the prompting strategies being compared; and e) that error correction procedures are inappropriate during early stages of learning. I briefly address my position regarding each. Source of funding: No source of funding reported.