The Use of Behavioral Skills Training to Teach Staff Discrete Trial Teaching

Skilled therapists are critical to the achievement of a high level of treatment integrity in behavior-analytic programs. Behavior Skills Training (BST) has been used to train staff to correctly implement discrete trial teaching (DTT) in a variety of previous studies. The current study used a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design to evaluate BST with a brief video model on acquisition of DTT skills of staff with no previous exposure to this approach and no prior experience in DTT implementation. Maintenance was assessed 7 days after the intervention was discontinued. Results of this study (a) supported Clayton and Headley's study (2019) findings of the effectiveness of using BST to teach DTT to newly hired staff, (b) obtained more precise acquisition data by breaking down error correction step into more steps, and (c) indicated high level of acceptability of the procedure on social validity measures. The influences of the number of task steps and participants' previous learning profiles on correctly implementing DTT, and participants' patterns of occurred errors are discussed.