Effectiveness and efficiency of discrete trial teaching delivered through traditional and embedded teaching arrangement in teaching receptive identification of occupations to children with autism spectrum disorder

The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness and efficiency of discrete trial teaching delivered through traditional and embedded teaching arrangement in teaching receptive identification of "occupations" to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Four children with ASD whose ages were between six and nine participated to this study. Parallel treatments design was used in the study. The researcher utilized simultaneous prompting procedure during both traditional and embedded discrete trial teaching. Findings showed that both discrete trial teaching delivered through traditional and embedded teaching arrangement were equally effective in teaching receptive identification of "occupations" to children with autism spectrum disorder. There was no difference in terms of the maintenance effects of discrete trial teaching delivered through traditional and embedded teaching arrangement. Generalization findings showed that children performed higher generalization in teaching sets taught through discrete trial teaching deliver through embedded teaching arrangement. Efficiency findings showed that embedded discrete trial teaching was more efficient than traditional discrete trial teaching across all efficiency parameters across all children. Findings also showed that children acquired their nontarget information stimuli to certain extent during both discrete trial teaching sessions. Social validity findings showed that participant children showed similar performance with their peers after intervention and mothers reported positive opinions towards social validity of the study. Keywords: Discrete trial teaching, Embedded teaching, Parallel treatments design, Simultaneous prompting, Autism spectrum disorder