Discrete Trial Teaching: A study on the comparison of three training strategies

Discrete trial teaching, as a teaching method, has been used to teach a variety of skills in many early intervention programmes for children with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Often, parents use these programmes in the absence of supervision by a behaviour analyst. This can cause problems in maintaining the integrity of the programmes. In this pilot study, two experiments examined three procedures designed to help parents/carers of children with a diagnosis of autism identify errors in videos simulating mock discrete trial sessions – written Text, a PowerPoint presentation, and an Animated lesson. Results suggested that the use of animations was superior in helping identify errors while the use of text alone was least effective. These preliminary findings suggest that traditional text-based methods for teaching need to be updated to take advantage of opportunities provided by new technology.