Assessing long‐term maintenance of staff performance following behavior skills training in a home‐based setting
After BST, some staff will lose DTT accuracy—teach them a brief self-evaluation checklist to claw back procedural integrity.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three home-based staff got a full BST package on running discrete-trial teaching.
Researchers then watched them for eight weeks with no extra coaching.
When two staff slipped, they got a short self-evaluation checklist to try to fix it.
What they found
One staff kept 100 % accuracy the whole eight weeks.
Two staff dropped below 80 %, then only climbed back to 90 % after using the checklist.
The checklist helped, but did not fully restore their first-day performance.
How this fits with other research
Frank-Crawford et al. (2024) looked at 82 DTT studies and found almost none tracked integrity past a few days. This paper fills that gap by showing what happens over two months.
Arkoosh et al. (2007) warned that low integrity can break behavior plans. The drop seen here proves their point in real homes.
Petit-Frere et al. (2021) and Ensor et al. (2024) also used BST plus follow-up checks. They saw steady maintenance, but they coached kids, not staff. The mixed results here suggest adults may need stronger self-monitoring tools than children do.
Why it matters
If you train staff with BST, plan for drift. Add a one-minute self-check at the end of each session. It will not keep everyone at 100 %, but it can stop a slide and save you from retraining from scratch.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We used a multiple baseline across participant design to evaluate the effects of behavior skills training on teaching three behavior therapists to implement discrete trial teaching (DTT) and evaluate the long‐term maintenance of skills acquired through behavioral skills training. For participants whose skills did not maintain, the authors evaluated an independent self‐evaluation procedure on their performance. Following DTT implementation training, maintenance probes were assessed at 2‐, 4‐, 6‐, and 8‐week follow‐ups. The results demonstrated that one participant maintained 100% procedural integrity (PI) through all follow‐ups, one participant decreased below mastery criterion at the 2‐week follow‐up, and one participant dropped below mastery criterion at the 4‐week follow‐up. Those participants that demonstrated decreased accuracy of implementation of DTT programs and were taught to implement a self‐evaluation procedure. Following self‐evaluation, PI maintained for up to 7 weeks for one participant. Our results suggest that if PI does not maintain, self‐evaluation may be a supplementary intervention to increase and maintain PI of new employees.
Behavioral Interventions, 2019 · doi:10.1002/bin.1642