The effectiveness of constant time delay procedure in teaching pre-school academic skills to children with developmental disabilities in small group arrangement

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of constant time delay procedure in teaching pre-school academic skills to children with developmental disabilities in a small group teaching arrangement. In addition, the extent achieved by learning through observation in a small group teaching arrangement utilizing constant time delay was also examined.Four children with developmental disabilities and between four and six years of age participated in the study. One of the single subject research designs, multiple probe design across behaviors was used and replicated across four subjects. Dependent variables of the study were the pre-school academic skills taught to each child through use of different stimuli whereas the independent variable is constant time delay procedure applied in a small group teaching arrangement. The research consisted of baseline, training, probe, follow-up, and generalization sessions. Training sessions of the study were carried out in an environment where all subjects were together. Data regarding inter-observer reliability and treatment integrity were also collected.Findings of the study indicated that constant time delay procedure was effective in teaching different pre-school academic skills to children with developmental disabilities by use of different stimuli in a small group teaching arrangement. Subjects were determined to retain their skills one, three, and four weeks after the training sessions were terminated, and they were also noted to generalize the target skills across different settings, people, and materials. Moreover, children were also identified to have learned the skills with high precision through observation. In the study, social comparison probe sessions were conducted in order to assess the performances of children with developmental disability in comparison with those of normally developing peers. In these sessions, peers? performances concerning the target skills of the study were determined to be at 100% precision level. Children with developmental disabilities were also identified to have exactly the same performance levels as their peers.