Instruction-following behavior of a retarded child and its controlling stimuli.
Reinforcement plus prompt fading teaches rigid instruction-following in children with severe ID, but you must program extra steps for flexible language.
01Research in Context
What this study did
One young learners boy with severe intellectual disability took part. He could not yet follow simple spoken directions like “touch your nose.”
The team used positive reinforcement plus fading of physical guidance. They started with full hand-over-hand help and slowly reduced it across sessions.
A multiple-baseline design tracked three separate instruction sets taught one after another.
What they found
The boy learned each trained instruction set quickly. Accuracy jumped from a large share to nearly a large share after training began.
When new, untrained instructions were given, performance stayed near zero. The child also failed to combine words into new sentences.
In short, the method created rote compliance, not flexible language use.
How this fits with other research
Schneider et al. (1967) and Fantino (1968) already showed that fading beats trial-and-error for simple visual or position tasks. The 1973 study moves the same logic to spoken instructions.
Sanders et al. (1989) later found that verbal-only prompting helped children with ID blend sounds better than picture prompts. Together these papers warn: extra cues can help at first, but strip them away early to protect generalization.
Hake et al. (1972) used the same manual-guidance-plus-reinforcement package to teach spoon use. Both studies show the method works, yet both also reveal the cost: if you stop the reinforcers, the skill drops.
Why it matters
If you run early learner programs, pair each new instruction with brief physical prompts and strong praise. Fade the touch fast and keep thin but steady reinforcement to hold the gain. Do not assume the child will follow novel directions or speak in new ways without extra teaching. Plan separate generalization lessons or add echoic training if flexible language is the goal.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A combination of positive reinforcement and fading of physical guidance was used to teach a profoundly retarded boy specific responses to specific verbal instructions. The design consisted of a multiple baseline of probe data across different verbal instructions. The subject started responding correctly to each verbal instruction as that item was trained in a multiple-baseline order. Generalization did not occur to items that had not yet been trained, nor did it occur to items included to assess generalization. Probes of variations in the verbal instructions, conducted after training was completed, revealed that generalization was minimal except in those cases where the variation consisted of the verb only, the noun only, the noun plus preposition, or where the verb of the instruction was presented last. Training a profoundly retarded 11-yr-old subject to respond to specific verbal instructions did not adequately facilitate the development of a generative instruction-following capability, nor did all verbal elements of the instruction control a specific response.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1973 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1973.6-663