Relative effectiveness of various letter discrimination procedures in directionality pretraining

Two investigations were conducted to provide information relevant to programming basic reading skills for retarded individuals. Both experiments utilized various procedures to teach subjects to discriminate between the letters b and d. The role of feedback and task format conditions was investigated in Experiment 1. Results indicated that two-choice discrimination learning was significantly more difficult than either oddity or matching-to-sample conditions. In Experiment 2 the effects of problem type and sample reduncancy were examined. Analyses indicated that simultaneous matching-to-sample procedures were significantly easier than successive matching-to-sample procedures. Performance with a delayed matching-to-sample transfer task did not reflect differential effects of training in either study.