Comparing Continuous and Discontinuous Data Collection during Discrete Trial Teaching of Tacting by Children with Autism
Recording every trial during tact DTT spots mastery sooner than first-trial probes without extra work later.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team taught new picture names to children with autism using discrete-trial training.
They compared two ways of writing data: every single trial (continuous) or only the first trial each session (discontinuous).
The same prompt-delay procedure was used for both data styles in an alternating-treatments design.
What they found
Kids learned the new labels a little faster when staff recorded every trial.
Generalization, maintenance, and on-task behavior looked the same no matter how data were taken.
Bottom line: continuous recording caught mastery sooner, but the end result was equal.
How this fits with other research
Spanoudis et al. (2011) warned that first-trial-only data can claim mastery too early. The new study agrees and shows the gap closes if you keep sampling more trials.
O’Neill et al. (2022) tweaked prompt delay while Giunta‐Fede et al. tweaked data density; both used alternating-treatments designs to speed up tact teaching.
Knopp et al. (2023) later showed telehealth DTT works just as well as table-top, proving the continuous-data edge holds even through a screen.
Why it matters
You can shave days off a program by charting every trial instead of probing once per session. The extra minute with the clipboard pays for itself when you spot mastery sooner and move to the next objective. Try it in your next tact set: run ten trials, record all, and watch the learning curve speak earlier.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The present study compared continuous and discontinuous data collection systems on acquisition, generalization, and maintenance of tacts, and on‐task behavior, during discrete trial teaching with three children with autism. A constant prompt‐delay procedure was used to teach tacts. Performance across data collection systems was compared using continuous measurement collected daily in the presence of teaching, discontinuous measurement of the first trial only, and discontinuous measurement collected weekly in the absence of teaching (i.e., probe data). An adapted alternating treatments design was used. For two of the three participants, tacts were acquired most rapidly in the continuous measurement condition, although the differences were small. For the third participant, no systematic differences were found in skill acquisition across the three data collection systems. For all three participants, minimal to no differences were found across data collection systems with regard to generalization and maintenance of tacting, and on‐task behavior. Additionally, procedural integrity was high and comparable across all data collection procedures. Overall, these results suggest the use of continuous data collection for teaching tacts to children with autism, as it provides the most sensitive measure of change in performance. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Behavioral Interventions, 2016 · doi:10.1002/bin.1446