Matching training procedures to outcomes. A behavioral and quantitative analysis.
Let the task cues pick the prompting direction—most-to-least for structured jobs, least-to-most for social ones.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team compared two prompting orders. One group got most-to-least help first. The other got least-to-most help first. Kids with intellectual disability joined the study.
Tasks were picked to feel different. Some were hands-on: make lunch, play a matching game. Others were social: answer a peer's question, order food at a counter.
What they found
Prompting order mattered, but the winner flipped by task. Most-to-least won for lunch and matching. Least-to-most won for social questions and ordering food.
The authors say the task itself gives off different cues. Match your prompting direction to those cues and teaching goes smoother.
How this fits with other research
Burgio et al. (1986) also used most-to-least prompts. They taught adults with ID a soccer pass. Skills stuck for months, showing the same prompt order can work for motor tasks.
Aljehany et al. (2020) looks like a clash but isn't. They found video prompts usually beat least-to-most for office tasks. The jobs were mechanical, not social, so the cues again favored a different method.
Schnell et al. (2020) extends the idea. They gave kids a five-minute prompt test, then picked the fastest route. Least-to-most still won most often, backing the social-task side of the 1998 finding.
Why it matters
Stop running the same prompt script for every goal. Ask: does this task give clear physical cues? Use most-to-least. Does it need the child to reach out socially? Use least-to-most. One quick flip can cut your session count.
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Join Free →List tomorrow's targets, mark each as 'physical' or 'social', then run most-to-least for physical and least-to-most for social.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
To analyze the effects of matching the prompting procedure used in training to the specific behavior chain to be taught, 3 students with mild to moderate retardation were taught four independent tasks: making a bagged lunch, playing a matching game with a peer, ordering food at a restaurant, and participating in a social conversation. Following baseline, all 3 students were exposed to one of two types of training procedures for each task: a least-to-most prompting procedure or a most-to-least prompting procedure. The type of training procedure was counter-balanced across students and tasks, whereas performance on the tasks was evaluated within a combination of a multiple-baseline design across participants and multiple-probe design across tasks. When the method of prompting was matched to the naturally occurring discriminative stimulus (SD) of the training stimulus, it greatly affected acquisition and maintenance of the skill in terms of differences in levels of and variability of performance. The most-to-least method of prompting, the matched method in these cases, was more efficient and effective for acquisition and generalization of the bagged-lunch and matching-game skills. The least-to-most method, the matched method in these cases, was more efficient and effective for social questions and ordering-food skills.
Behavior modification, 1998 · doi:10.1177/01454455980223011