Date of Award
4-2015
Culminating Project Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Special Studies: M.S.
Department
Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy
College
School of Health and Human Services
Third Advisor
John H. Hoover
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Keywords and Subject Headings
Data collection, first-trial-only, trial-by-trial
Abstract
Discrete trial teaching (DTT) is a popular teaching method in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis. Continuous trial-by-trial (TBT) data collection for DTT can be labor intensive and collecting data for the first trial only (FTO) holds the promise of reducing the workload for instructors. The existing literature comparing FTO data analysis to TBT data analysis reports widely varying results regarding the number of trials to mastery and the ability to maintain the skill. The current study utilized data from DTT programs for three participants to examine how closely the accuracy of the first trial in a series represents the accuracy of the all the trials in the corresponding block. The results across participants showed that a correct response on the first trial was correlated with an average accuracy score of 86.9%, 87.0%, and 74.8% for the three participants. An incorrect response on the first trial was associated with an average accuracy score of 55.3%, 42.0%, and 32.0% for each participant. The results across matched programs showed even larger variance, albeit with smaller data sets. The author concludes that factors inherent to each student and program should be considered before deciding to use FTO instead of TBT.
Recommended Citation
Harrison, Andy, "The Effect of Student and Program Variability on the Representativeness of First-Trail-Only Data Collection" (2015). Culminating Projects in Community Psychology, Counseling and Family Therapy. 102.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/cpcf_etds/102
