Prompt dependence can be a serious problem for individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder or intellectual disabilities. The ability to perform skills independently is important for a high-quality life and assimilation in the community among many other things. Assessments of instructional strategies may be an effective tool for identifying instructional strategies that decrease one’s reliance on prompts. An alternating treatment design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of an assessment of instructional strategies on independent responses during auditory-visual discrimination tasks. Assessment conditions included positional prompt, gestural prompt, physical prompt, and identity matching to sample. The most effective instructional strategy was identified as the strategy that corresponded to quickest acquisition of independent responses. Results of the assessment demonstrated differences in individual learning patterns for each of the 3 participants. However, the differences observed in the assessment among instructional strategies were not significant. Implications of these results do suggest to educators that conducting an assessment of instructional strategies may be a useful strategy for identifying differences in learning patterns. Limitations and directions for future research are also discussed.

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This design report details the development of a summer training experience for peer mentors in the Freshman Mentoring program at Brigham Young University. The purpose of the project was to develop an extended training program which would assist peer mentors in developing core mentoring skills necessary for their work with first-year students. The design of the training was informed by a number of theoretical frameworks including experiential learning, reflective practice, and narrative design. The training was evaluated using a post-then survey instrument as well as analysis of qualitative data collected from learners throughout the training. Analyses of these data suggested that peer mentors increased both their mentoring skill and confidence in providing mentoring to first-year students. This document also reports on the practical, design, and theoretical insights which emerged from the project as well as their implications for other designers who face similar design challenges. Finally, a brief discussion of the way in which the project has influenced the professional development of the designer is included.

Individuals, who work in high risk confrontational (HRC) settings in which a conflict exists, experience high-stress levels in their jobs and are known to have a high level of decreased performance and decreased survival. Individuals being trained to handle such conflicts should be trained effectively to accomplish the ultimate objective, staying alive. The problem is the lack of research and program evaluations examining effectiveness of training simulations in the transfer of skills under HRC settings. The purpose of my study was to test if the skill of target acquisition could be effectively transferred to a real environment (RE) after exposure within a virtual environment (VE). Ackerman's (1988) Theory of Ability Determinants of Skill Acquisition supports the progression participants advance through in the transfer of learning. A randomized posttest only comparison group design was used. The population involved 24 novice paintball players. Participants were randomly assigned to a simulation treatment or a non-simulation comparison application. Two days after receiving the intervention, participants engaged in live practice sessions (game 1 and game 2) in a RE where target acquisition skills were measured. Evidence suggests significant differences were found between novice players in the type of intervention received and the number of targets acquired in a RE, whereas, no significant change in scores was found between practice sessions, and no interaction was found between intervention received and practice. Recommendations for replicating studies include: (a) focusing on the manipulation of specific variables within the training context, (b) using different live environments, (c) examining factors that influence teaming and strategy formation, and (d) combining experts and novice players for a closer representation of a population in an HRC setting.

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Übung beeinflusst nicht nur wie sondern auch welche Information verarbeitet wird. Die bisherige Forschung zur Informationsreduktion (Haider & Frensch, 1996) hat die Wichtigkeit des letzteren Aspektes für den kognitiven Fertigkeitserwerb herausgearbeitet. Informationsreduktion tritt in Situationen auf, in denen Aufgaben sowohl relevante als auch irrelevante Information enthalten. Informationsreduktion stellt einen Strategiewechsel dar, bei dem ein Übergang von einer Strategie, die das Prozessieren aller Elemente einer Aufgabe beinhaltet, hin zu einer Strategie, bei der nur die relevanten Elemente prozessiert werden, stattfindet. Einerseits wurde in vielen Kontexten (z.B. Psychologie der Mensch-Maschine Interaktion, Pädagogische-, und Sport-Psychologie) beobachtet, dass Menschen dazu neigen, irrelevante Information nach mehrfacher Darbietung zu ignorieren. Andererseits ist sowohl hinsichtlich der theoretischen Auseinandersetzung mit Strategiewechsel im kognitiven Fertigkeitserwerb, als auch aus praktischer Sicht nicht genügend geklärt, wie Informationsreduktion stattfindet und welche Faktoren fördernd bzw. hemmend wirken. In der hier zusammengefassten Forschung, hatten Probandinnen und Probanden die Aufgabe zu prüfen, ob alphanumerische Zeichenketten dem Alphabet folgen oder nicht. Die Zeichenketten bestanden aus zwei Teilen. Einer der beiden Teile war immer korrekt und daher letztlich irrelevant. Da verschiedene Zeichenketten unterschiedlich oft pro Übungsblock präsentiert wurden, konnte ermittelt werden, ob Informationsreduktion Item-spezifisch oder Item-generell stattfindet. Die Frage ist also, ob die Versuchspersonen den irrelevanten Teil für jede Zeichenkette einzeln zu ignorieren lernen, oder aber die Fertigkeit zum Ignorieren des irrelevanten Teiles auf einmal für alle Zeichenketten erwerben. Letzteres traf zu, Informationsreduktion fand Item-generell statt. Die Befunde sind inkonsistent mit der Annahme dass Strategiewechsel im Allgemeinen und Informationsreduktion im Besonderen, ausschließlich durch Item-spezifische, datengetriebene Lernprozesse erklärbar sind und willkürliche Entscheidungen beim Strategiewechsel folglich keine Rolle spielen. Statt dessen deuten die Daten (Reaktionszeiten, Fixationen, Transfer-Fehler) darauf hin, dass Strategiewechsel top-down moduliert sind. / Practice not only affects how but also which information is processed. Past research on Information Reduction (Haider & Frensch, 1996) has underscored the importance of the latter aspect for cognitive skill acquisition. Information Reduction applies in situations in which tasks contain both relevant and irrelevant information, and denotes a change from a strategy involving processing all elements of a task to a processing-relevant-elements-only strategy. On the one hand, it has been repeatedly observed in a broad range of contexts (e.g., human-machine interaction, educational and sports psychology) that people tend to ignore irrelevant information after repeated exposure. On the other hand, both from the perspective of theories on skill acquisition and for practical concerns, it is not sufficiently understood how Information Reduction takes place and which factors foster or impede it. In the research presented here, participants had the task to verify whether or not alphanumeric strings followed the alphabetical order. These strings were a compound of two parts, one of which was always correct and thus effectively irrelevant. As the different strings were repeated at different rates per practice block, it could be tested whether people learn to ignore irrelevant aspects of a task string by string or rather once and for all strings. Information Reduction was item-general rather than item-specific. The data are inconsistent with the view that strategy change in general, and Information Reduction in particular, is exclusively based on item-specific data-driven learning processes, bare of the involvement of a voluntary decision. Rather, RTs, fixations, and transfer errors indicated that strategy change entails top-down modulation.

The term social skills has been specifically defined as learned behaviors that allow an individual to engage in socially acceptable interactions with other individuals such that the interactions lead to positive responses from others and aid in the avoidance of negative responses (Elliott & Gresham, 1993). The current study investigated the ability of six adolescent females between the ages of 13 and 16 years to acquire a set of social skills through training. Participants' acquisition of the skills before and after training was assessed through role-play assessments and was experimentally demonstrated using a multiple-baseline across skills design. Secondary survey information (Child Behavior Checklist and adapted Ansell Casey Life Skills Assessment) was collected from participants and their parents to attempt to index effects of training on other behaviors of the youth. All of the participants acquired the skills taught and demonstrated them with increased or variable levels of accuracy post-training. Minimal changes in scores were documented on both secondary survey measures.

Family level data was collected from those served in a state-wide rollout of SafeCare® in Georgia between January of 2010 and November of 2011. Families who received SafeCare were trained in the intervention’s three modules: Parent-Child or Parent-Infant Interaction, Home Safety, and Child Health. The purpose of this study was to measure changes in parental skill demonstration by analyzing pre- and post-training assessments. Additionally, parental demographic characteristics were also assessed for associations with skill acquisition within each module. Follow-up analysis concluded that families displayed increases in parenting skills among all SafeCare modules. Moderator analysis showed that those with only one child showed greater decreases in home hazards as did those with two children. Also, it was found that income level moderated performance in the Parent-Child Interaction module with participants below the median income level exhibiting a greater increase in PCI skill demonstration than those above the median income level. Further research should consider modeling multiple parental characters (e.g. CPS status and income) with skill performance over time. Lastly, additional research should aim to determine if those who exhibit increases in parenting skills are also less likely to experience future child maltreatment reports.

I outline a framework for researching the effects of practice schedule on skill acquisition, based upon stage theories of information processing and stage theories of skill acquisition. Skilled performance requires stimulus identification, response selection, and response execution. I hypothesize that practice schedule affects learning in two types of information processing stages: stimulus-oriented and response-oriented stages. The loci of these effects differ based on the stage. In stimulus-oriented stages, practice schedule affects concept and categorization learning via contiguity of exemplars and feature saliency. In response-oriented stages, practice schedule affects the efficiency with which individuals produce a response by affecting response preparation. I evaluated this framework and theory with 4 experiments that manipulated practice schedule and amount of practice, in 2 domains with different information processing demands. Experiments~1~and~2 focused on response-oriented stages via a task that required participants to execute a multisegment movement according to a target time. Experiments~3~and~4 focused on stimulus-oriented stages via a task that required participants to categorize football play diagrams. Within the 2 task domains the amount of acquisition practice was manipulated to test whether different durations of acquisition training changed how practice schedules affected retention and transfer performance. The practice schedule manipulation had reliable effects on performance and learning when task performance involved either response preparation or induction of categorization rules. Practice schedule did not affect performance or learning when task performance involved categorization decisions, after the rules had been learned. Additionally, I report a novel method for quantifying amount of practice that allows comparisons across task domains.

Abstract This study evaluated the effectiveness of a classroom based training in teaching social skills to four adolescent females between the ages of 13–17 years old and residing in foster care. The training took place over a three week period, one night a week, for three hours at a time and utilized a Behavioral Skills Training format. The assessments were conducted via role play scenarios; pre- and posttraining. The results show each participant demonstrated an overall increase in skills from pretraining to posttraining indicating that youth in foster care were capable of learning the skills taught.