Errorless teaching and covert, learner processes

[Guest guest]

Greetings all, in my opinion the following is an important issue for everyone

in the direct teaching business.

The comment made by a behavior analyst (cited in a previous posting), " does

not promote problem solving and logic " , which was intended, presumably, to

criticize the errorless teaching strategies employed by those of use who would

refer to ourselves as " efficient ABA " practitioners, is, in my opinion,

misguided and potentially harmful to many students with ASDs.

Of course, it must be said that the method of instruction needs to fit the

individual student's needs. And, with that said, skills are skills, and skills

are observable, period. Covert processes (like problem solving and logic), while

interesting certainly (don't you wish you could examine directly the workings of

certain human brains?), should never be allowed to interfere with effective

instruction. Far more compelling for me is the theory that the progress of

children with developmental challenges is often hindered when something is

learned incorrectly the first time or inconsistently over time. These are

learners often who have great difficulty discriminating one instruction or thing

or activity or image from another. To suggest that giving such a student more

time to " figure it out on their own " is going to help that student's already

damaged or limited discrimination ability is pure wishful thing, flies in the

face of the autistic condition, and smacks of

self-serving propaganda. Remember, " You get what you teach " . If you teach a

student to take his time and respond slowly (for whatever good sounding reason,

such as encouraging the student to " problem solve " ), well, that's what you're

likely going to get--slow responding.

When in doubt, teach errorlessly. IMHO, by prompting quickly and errorlessly

then fading out those prompts quickly you avoid prompt dependency, establish

fluency, and build independence much more effectively than giving the student

extra time during which no observable learning is taking place, acccidental

reinforcement is more likely (should the student guess correctly), additional,

incidental, hard-to-control prompts may be delivered (which the instructor might

claim assists the student's " problem solving " process--that we can't see!) such

as eye position or body language, and what the student might be learning is how

to avoid this task that is difficult or onorous. Seems to me that for many

learners the alternative to errorless teaching is something like chaos.

Hampel, Ph.D. BCBA

PS--original posting follows....

hatteralice <hatteralice@...> wrote:

I have one more question on an aba technique. My provider (lovaas

style) asserts that vb's use of errorless learning does not promote

problem solving and logic for the child.

Is this accurate? Could someone explain how this is true OR why this in

not true?

Thanks

Alice

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