The proposed program of research seeks to develop an integrated stimulus control technology for teaching basic skills to people who are mentally retarded. The studies focus on a number of advanced operant conditioning techniques that can establish new stimulus- stimulus and stimulus-response relations. The techniques include: (a) stimulus equivalence and sequencing procedures, (b) constructed response matching to sample; (c) stimulus component prompting; and (d) prompting methods that utilize specific and generalized controlling relations (e.g., identity and exclusion principles). Previous studies, conducted by our laboratories and others, have shown that these powerful techniques for analyzing complex human learning can also be directly applied to provide remedial training for mentally retarded people. The studies have also shown that these techniques can potentially increase teaching efficiency because they lead to the emergence of new behavior that has not been directly conditioned. No one so far, however, has accomplished the next logical step -- blending the techniques into an integrated approach for teaching in special education settings. Our studies will begin to establish the basis for this general integration. They will focus on a small number of well-defined pre-academic skill areas, concentrating on procedures for teaching specific prerequisites for rudimentary reading and spelling and for elementary monetary and related numerical competency.
Our specific aims are to: (a) develop methods for teaching discriminative baselines that are more effective and reliable than those currently available; (b) refine procedures for establishing equivalence relations among pictures. letters, words, numbers. quantities. and their spoken names; (c) help better define the interdependence (or independence) of """"""""receptive"""""""" skills (e.g., listening, reading) and """"""""expressive"""""""" ones (e.g., speaking. writing); and (d) extend studies of sequential behavior, focusing on possible prerequisites for elementary syntactical relations among words, printed and spoken.
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