This investigation compared the effectiveness and efficiency (sessions through criterion, errors through criterion, minutes of instruction time) of constant time delay and the system of least prompts procedures in teaching students with moderate mental retardation to read food words found in grocery stores. Two sessions were provided each day in their classroom, one with constant time delay and one with the system of least prompts. Two students were taught 12 words, and two students were taught 16 words. The parallel treatments design was used to assess the effects of the two instructional strategies. The results indicate that both strategies produced criterion level performance in the training setting, and generalized across settings, persons, and stimuli. However, the constant time delay procedure was more efficient than the system of least prompts in terms of the number of sessions, percent of errors, and minutes of direct instruction time.
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