A Preliminary Analysis of Equivalence-Based Instruction to Train Instructors to Implement Discrete Trial Teaching

Methods to efficiently train instructors to implement evidence-based procedures with children diagnosed with developmental disabilities have been a prominent interest in educational and clinical settings. Behavioral skills training (BST) is frequently recommended and includes four components beginning with instruction. In most studies, the instruction component consists of giving the trainee the protocol for the procedure later to be trained. Recently, researchers have included more robust instructional components, which have produced acquisition without requiring the additional components of BST. The current study evaluated the use of equivalence-based instruction with embedded modeling to teach four instructors to implement discrete trial teaching. All instructors emitted class-consistent responding to untrained relations following equivalence-based instruction, and two participants demonstrated high levels of fidelity on discrete trial teaching probes. The remaining participants required a brief, three-trial model of DTT before mastery was observed on these probes. Our findings suggest that including a more robust instruction during BST may increase the efficiency of training instructors to conduct discrete trial teaching.