Reading skills are essential for all students for their successful advancement through school and on into adult life. With limited English, many Non English Speaking Background (NESB) students are under-achieving at school due to their lack of reading ability in English. This research investigates a skills-based program with an emphasis on decoding (often referred to as a bottom-up theoretical perspective) compared to a program emphasising the development of comprehension strategies, where higher level thinking is required (top-down perspective). Using a case study approach with one NESB student, it appeared that a skills-based approach was more successful and preferred by the student.

This project investigated whether a precision teaching method used with learning disabled high school students (grades 9-12) could give them the skills needed to pass a minimum based competency test in the area of local, state and national government. The specific objective of this project was to determine if the use of precision teaching enabled the students to retain the facts needed to pass a competency test required for graduation. A multiple-baseline design across behaviors was used to show the effect of precision teaching in mastering the needed facts. The data from each baseline improved and surpassed the set criteria when the intervention was introduced. The Cache School District requires mastery level test score of 70% or higher for each competency test. The pretest scores of the students in this study ranged from 40% to 58%. When all three interventions were completed, the students' test scores ranged from 92% to 100%, thus meeting and surpassing the school district's mastery level.

This study examines the effects of accuracy-only training and fluency training on retention of material learned. Two adolescent participants with traumatic brain injuries were taught to name 2 sets of lowercase Greek letters. Each of the 2 sets consisted of 7 letters. Practice and rate of reinforcement were controlled for in this study. Fluency trained letters showed higher retention (percent correct during retention checks) than the accuracy-only trained letters.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:18:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Daniela Ferreira de Lacerda.pdf: 480408 bytes, checksum: b0aeba57ec9e6e998dc267a4ba8df249 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-05-30 / In his work Technology of teaching, Skinner displays the characteristics that a teaching program should have, so that the students would reach the given objectives with the least number of mistakes possible. In this book the author proposes a model for displaying the teaching contingencies that became known as programmed instruction. The present work analyzes national articles of scientific publications about the application of such principles of Behavior Analysis to Brazilian Education, in the period between 1961 and 2007, that derived from Skinner s original propositions concerning programmed instruction, aiming at identifying the characteristics that such application gained here. For the analysis, 93 articles were selected based on a list of keywords, applied to a set of articles withdrawn from previous studies (especially Freitas, 1987 and César, 2002) as well as articles available on the internet, from online journals databases. The article selection was based on the presence in the title, in the keywords of the article or in the abstract ― of words such as: programmed instruction, personalized system of instruction, teaching programming, teaching contingencies, among others. Articles that contained words referring to other theoretical approaches and/or that didn t mention Behavior Analysis, nor referred to publications from that approach, were excluded. The results show that research on programmed instruction had a peak in the 1970 s and has diminished ever since. In the past three decades, there was an average of less than one publication a year in the journals that have been studied. The results also show that characteristics of programmed instruction have been found in many teaching programs present in the articles, with special emphasis on: successive approach to final behavior through small steps; students progression based on high performance; and respect for students individual rhythm. The most frequently found teaching program formats were, in decreasing order: (1) ways of teaching programming that do not reproduce any standard model; (2) Personalized System of Instruction (PSI); and (3) programmed instruction, according to the model proposed by Skinner (1972/1968) / Em sua obra Tecnologia do ensino, Skinner explicita as características que um programa de ensino deveria ter, para levar os aprendizes a atingirem os objetivos propostos com um mínimo de erros. Nessa obra, o autor propõe um modelo de disposição de contingências de ensino que veio a ser conhecida como instrução programada. O presente trabalho teve como objetivo analisar artigos de periódicos científicos nacionais sobre a aplicação dos princípios da Análise do Comportamento à Educação no Brasil, no período de 1961 a 2007, decorrentes da proposta original de Skinner de instrução programada, a fim de identificar características que essa aplicação assumiu entre nós. Para essa análise, foram selecionados 93 artigos, com base em uma lista de palavras-chave, aplicadas a artigos de relações de periódicos utilizados em estudos anteriores (em especial Freitas, 1987 e César, 2002) e também a artigos de periódicos encontrados em algumas bases de dados disponíveis na internet. A seleção dos artigos baseou-se na presença no título, nas palavras-chave ou no resumo ― de termos como: instrução programada, sistema personalizado de ensino, programação de ensino, contingências de ensino, entre outros. Artigos foram excluídos quando estavam presentes termos que remetiam a outras abordagens teóricas e/ou quando não faziam menção a análise do comportamento nem continham citação bibliográfica desta abordagem. Os resultados mostram que os estudos em ensino programado tiveram seu auge na década de 1970 e vêm diminuindo desde então, sendo que nas décadas de 1980, 1990 e 2000 foi publicado, em média, menos de um desses artigos por ano nas revistas pesquisadas. Mostram também que características da instrução programada estão presentes em muitos dos programas de ensino tratados nesses artigos, em especial as características: aproximações sucessivas ao comportamento final através de pequenos passos; progressão dos alunos baseada no alto domínio; e respeito ao ritmo do estudante. Os formatos de programas de ensino mais frequentemente encontrados foram, em ordem decrescente: (1) formas de programação de ensino que não reproduzem um modelo padrão; (2) Personalysed System of Instruction (PSI); e (3) instrução programada, conforme o modelo proposto por Skinner (1972/1968)