Teaching Learners to Answer “Or” Questions

1. Teaching Learners to Answer “Or” Questions Steve Ward, MA, BCBA And Teresa Grimes, MS, BCBA Whole Child Consulting

2. What are “or” questions • The learner hears or reads a question, like “Which one do you eat, _____ or _____?” and answers correctly • Responses are always part intraverbal, and may also be part mand and/or part tact

3. Why should we teach “or” questions? • Helps minimize rote responses • Promotes flexibility in attending to verbal stimuli • Many learners seem able to handle tougher content in this format than in others • May not teach new content, but teaches demonstration of existing content knowledge in a new context. • “or” questions are asked in the real world • Offering our learners options helps us more accurately identify their MO’s

4. How do some instructional approaches fail? • They rely on corrections, echoic prompts, positional prompts, or confirmation prompts. • The stimulus control for these prompts is too distant from the appropriate stimulus control. • The initial verbal SD alters the evocative effect of the options. This is a conditional discrimination.

5. Failure, cont. • The “discrete trial” version of your learner may be too often present. (e.g., “E”). This type of learner relies too frequently on errorless prompting or confirmation. • Error patterns… • Student defaults to second option • Student tacts/echoes both options • Student says “or ____” with their answer

6. An effective approach • Get rid of “Discrete trial E” -minimize/abandon correction procedures -emphasize shaping more than prompting -set program list to keep prompts to fewer than 20% of daily responses

7. Prerequisites • Maybe not necessary, but certainly helpful to have TFFC.

8. How many steps does your learner need? • We’ll start with the steps R required. He was easy to teach, so we needed a total of 3 steps and it took about 15 minutes. • We discovered the need to create extra steps with tougher learners. It is advisable to use as few steps as possible, but keep independent learner accuracy above 80%.

9. Roby’s steps • “Which one do you eat, banana or tire?” (with each object held up AS IT IS NAMED) • “Which one do you ride, banana or bike?” (with a fist held up for each option) • “Which one do you write with, bike or pencil?” (with a finger held up for each option)

10. Important notes • It is helpful to keep the positioning of the options consistent (e.g., first option on their left and second option on their right) • You must vary the position of the CORRECT option, though.

11. E’s steps • Along the steps in this hierarchy, we had to gradually shift the proportion of responses from the current step to the next step, while differentially reinforcing correct responses at the targeted step. • It was hard and took a long time, but 6 staff learned it well enough to teach with it.

12. E’s steps, continued • Tact 2 items and put in the context of a full sentence (e.g., “A book is for reading”). We used this to interfere with E’s tendency to tact/echo both options…to do so would have exceeded his MLU. • Hold 2 items in front of him and ask “Which one is for reading?”, requiring a full sentence answer.

13. E’s steps, continued 3. Hold 2 items behind your back, ask the “which” question, and bring out first the option on his left, then the one on his right, saying nothing as you bring them out. 4. Same as step 3, but you name the objects as you bring them out (without saying “or”)

14. E’s steps, continued 5. Same as 4, but now you include the “or” 6. Presented with fists instead of objects (same timing, and we had to re-drop the “or”) 7. Fists with the “or” 8. Fingers with the “or”

15. Summary • If you understand stimulus control, you can teach difficult concepts to hard-to-teach kids. • Though teaching kids to answer “or” questions doesn’t cure them, it does create numerous new options, and most learners can handle more difficult material in this format.