Reducing time limits: a means to increase behavior of retardates.

The team worked with three students who had intellectual disability. All were in a special-ed classroom.

Kids did math problems for tokens. First they got 20 minutes. Then the teacher cut the time.

Some cuts were sudden. Others were slow, two minutes less each day. The class flipped back and forth to see which way worked best.

Slow trims doubled or even tripled correct answers. When the full 20 minutes came back, the gains stayed.

A quick drop from 20 to 10 minutes hurt accuracy. Kids worked less and made more errors.

Gradual shrinking of time plus tokens was the winning pair.

Bacon-Prue et al. (1980) later moved the same idea to a job site. Adults with ID learned to clock in and out on time using picture cues. That study extends this one from school desks to paychecks.

Jenkins et al. (1973) worked in the same room type and age group. They used DRL to cut talking out. Both papers show single-case designs in special-ed, but one aimed at less disruption while the other aimed at more work.

Jarrold et al. (1994) also paid tokens for math, yet they held time steady and varied pay rate. Their kids still under-matched. The two papers together say: if you want more math output, tweak time first, not pay rate.

You can squeeze more correct work out of students with ID by shaving minutes off the clock, but only if you do it gradually. Start with the usual time, drop two minutes every couple of days, keep tokens flowing, and watch accuracy climb. When you need to give the full period back, the boost sticks. Try it next week during independent math seatwork.