The effects of graduated stimulus change on the acquisition of a simple discrimination in severely retarded boys.
Graduated stimulus fading beats trial-and-error for teaching simple position discriminations to learners with severe ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Fantino (1968) worked with 12 boys who had severe intellectual disability. The boys were between 8 and 14 years old.
The team wanted to teach a simple left-right position discrimination. One group got graduated stimulus fading. The other group got plain trial-and-error training.
What they found
Eleven of the twelve boys who got fading learned the task with almost no errors. Only one of seven boys who got trial-and-error ever learned.
over the study period, the fading group still remembered the task. Boys who first failed with trial-and-error had trouble even when fading was added later.
How this fits with other research
Schneider et al. (1967) ran a nearly identical study one year earlier. They also found that fading tripled success rates compared with trial-and-error.
Barlow et al. (1973) and Frederiksen et al. (1978) later showed the same errorless benefit works with typically developing kids. The method keeps helping even when the task gets harder.
Foster et al. (1979) warns that letting learners fail first can block later success. Their data match E's finding that prior trial-and-error history weakens retention.
Why it matters
If you teach learners with severe ID, start new discriminations with graduated stimulus fading, not trial-and-error. You will see faster acquisition, fewer problem behaviors, and better long-term memory. When a learner has already failed with trial-and-error, expect extra retraining time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Methods were compared for teaching severely retarded boys to discriminate the position of a 0.75-in. black square and to press the response key closest to it. Seven boys were given trial-and-error training; one learned the task. The six boys who did not learn were presented with a program of graduated stimulus changes. All but one acquired the performance, and he was under appropriate control during the program. When he reached the criterion stimuli, he reverted to a position-based response learned during trial-and-error training. Six similar subjects were presented with graduated stimulus training alone. All six learned the criterion discrimination with few or no errors. Both groups were tested for retention of the criterion performance 35 days after training was completed. Two boys who had near-perfect criterion discrimination performances showed no signs of retention after 35 days. These boys had a history of trial-and-error training.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1968 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1968.11-39