Evaluation of a changing criterion intervention to increase fluent responding with an elementary age student with autism.

Abstract

Fluent responding is an important aspect of instructional hierarchy (Martens & Witt, 2004). The instructional hierarchy involves several levels: acquisition, fluency, maintenance, generalization, and adaptation (in order from lowest to highest). The assumption of model is that a lower level goal needs to be attained before a higher level goal can be achieved. Regarding fluency, an individual must begin to demonstrate a accurately (acquisition) before she can respond fluently and individual must respond fluently before she can demonstrate retention of responding in absence of systematic practice (maintenance). At core of fluency is rate of responding (Eckert, Dunn, & Ardoin, 2006; Martens et al., 2007; Martens & Witt, 2004). During acquisition of a skill focus is on accurate responding, regardless of latency to respond. The goal of acquisition is to bring responding under appropriate stimulus control of instructions (Martens & Witt, 2004). After accurate responding is acquired next goal is to perform an acquired skill rapidly (p. 24). Fluency building has been applied to reading and math instruction (Codding, Eckert, Fanning, Shiyko, & Solomon, 2007; Hartnedy, Mozzoni, & Fahoum, 2005: Martens et al., 2006), although it can be applied to any acquired learning objective. One method of increasing fluent responding is to make rewards contingent on rapid responding. Noell and colleagues (1998) examined effects of contingent rewards on reading fluency and found that student's speed to reading increased when rewards were made contingent on an increase in correct words per minute from previous reading session. Similar results were found by Martens and colleagues (2007) who examined effects of contingencies on fluency. Specifically, these researchers provided students with a reading passage, some training on that passage, and a post-assessment reading passage. Rewards were contingent on a 50% increase in fluency from first to last reading assessment. The difficulty of reading passages was systematically increased so that students became more fluent with increasingly difficult reading passages. The changing criterion design (Cooper, Heron, Heward, 1987) is appropriate for systematically increasing difficulty of a subject matter by examining the effects of reinforcement or punishment contingencies as they are applied in a graduated or stepwise fashion to a single target behavior (p.219). Regarding fluency and contingent rewards, this design can be used to systematically increase number of fluent responses that are needed to obtain rewards, first by conducting a baseline of fluent responses and then making mean number of fluent responses first criterion for obtaining rewards during intervention. The criterion can be systematically increased until desired number of fluent responses is demonstrated. This design can be further strengthened by adding a baseline reversal so that causal statements can be made regarding effects of intervention on performance (Cooper et al., 1987). The current study examined effects of contingent rewards on building fluent responding in a student diagnosed with autism. The effects were evaluated using a changing criterion design whereby number of consecutive fluent responses needed to earn a reward was systematically increased based on student's performance. This intervention was conducted in a public school setting and implemented by a bachelor's level teacher's aide and supervised by a behavioral consultant attending a doctoral school psychology program. Method Participant, Setting, and Roles Frank was an 11 year old boy diagnosed with Autism, enrolled in a 4th grade at a public school. The student spent majority of his day in a substantially separate classroom next to 4th grade mainstream classroom. …