An evaluation of the stimulus equivalence paradigm to teach single-subject design to distance education students via Blackboard.
Use one-to-many equivalence training to make new intraverbals pop out without extra teaching.
01Research in Context
What this study did
College students taking a distance class on single-subject design logged into Blackboard. They got equivalence lessons in two orders: one-to-many (OTM) or linear-series (LS).
The goal was to see which order would spark new intraverbals—answers the students had never been taught directly.
What they found
OTM won. Most students who got OTM could say new facts about design after training. The LS group mostly could not.
In short, OTM created emergent relations; LS did not.
How this fits with other research
Morgan (1988) showed that teaching a mediating handsign first lets kids with ID match new items. The target study flips the question: which sequence best builds brand-new intraverbals in adults?
Dube et al. (1998) removed extra steps and helped learners with severe ID master identity matching. The target keeps the same equivalence family but swaps the population and the target skill.
Jenkins et al. (2016) found one rehearsal plus feedback is enough for staff to run functional analyses. The target study echoes that efficiency theme—OTM gives you more learning for the same teaching time.
Why it matters
If you teach concepts online, choose OTM sequencing. Present one core idea first, then branch to many examples. Students will talk about the concept in ways you never drilled. Skip the long chains of LS; they rarely give you that free, untaught language.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Researchers have begun to investigate the emergence of novel intraverbals using equivalence-based instruction (EBI) in typically developing children (Carp & Petursdottir, 2012; Pérez-González, Herszlikowicz, & Williams, 2008). We sought to replicate and extend the previous research by investigating two stimulus equivalence training sequences (e.g., linear series-LS and one to many-OTM) in the emergence of novel intraverbals in a two-part study with college students. Experiment 1 was designed to partially replicate the previous research by training intraverbals using an LS arrangement and then testing for the emergence of novel intraverbals. Novel intraverbals did not emerge after baseline training alone for the majority of participants. Experiment 2 investigated whether a different training sequence (i.e., OTM) would result in the emergence of novel intraverbals. Novel intraverbals did emerge following baseline training alone for the majority of participants. Overall, these results suggest that training intraverbals in an OTM training sequence may establish conditional discriminations during training, which may make it a more advantageous sequence, in that following training, more novel intraverbals emerge.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2012 · doi:10.1901/jaba.2012.45-329