Instructive Feedback

Abstract

Instructive feedback involves presenting extra nontarget stimuli in the consequent events of instructional trials and not requesting students to respond to those stimuli during instruction. The purposes of this study were to evaluate whether students (a) would acquire the behaviors for instructive feedback stimuli when those stimuli were presented after trials on any of a set of target behaviors rather than after a given target behavior and (b) acquired instructive feedback behaviors during acquisition of target behaviors or after mastery of those target behaviors. Four 11-year-old boys with mild disabilities participated, instruction occurred in their special education classroom, and a multiple-probe design across sets of behavior was used. Results indicate that the students (a) acquired their target behaviors, (b) acquired a high percentage of the behaviors for instructive feedback stimuli, and (c) generally acquired instructive feedback responses while acquiring target behaviors. The findings are discussed in terms of future research on instructive feedback and implications for practice.

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