An extension and refinement of telephone emergency-skills training. A comparison of training methods.

Abstract

Three experiments were carried out to teach children how to respond to home emergencies. Experiment 1 compared the effectiveness of three training procedures, self-instruction training/ self-reward, self-instructional training/ external-reward, and behavioral training, in the acquisition and maintenance of emergency telephone-dialing skills. While all three training procedures were effective in enhancing performance, the self-instructional/self-reward group appeared to perform somewhat better during the follow-up phases. Experiment 2 compared the effectiveness of the above-mentioned training procedures on teaching subjects how to respond to problem situations likely to be encountered when making a telephone call. The problem situations trained were no dial tone and party line. Although all training groups performed similarly, initially following training, the self-instructional/self-reward group again performed somewhat better over time. In Experiment 3, a discrimination-training procedure was initiated to teach children when to make an emergency telephone call. Subjects were taught to respond differentially to fire-emergency, nonemergency, and neutral situations. In a multiple-baseline design this training procedure was shown to be effective in teaching discriminations and in promoting response generalization to untrained scenes. Implications of these findings are discussed in light of the future research efforts in the area.