This study compared the effects of two instructional trial scheduling formats (massed practice only vs. combined massed practice and distributed practice) on the acquisition, transfer, and generalization of explicitly prompted requests. A general case instructional analysis and naturalistic teaching strategies were used by classroom staff to teach 2 sets of single word requests to 5 children with severe disabilities (CA = 4-8). A within subjects adapted alternated treatments design (AADT) (Holcombe, Wolery, & Gast, 1994) with interspersed transfer and stimulus generalization probes was employed to collect and analyze child performance data. Results indicated that (a) the general case / naturalistic teaching approach was effective for all children, and (b) there were only minimal and / or child-specific differences in the relative effectiveness of the two trial scheduling formats.
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