An evaluation of textual prompts and generalized textual instruction-following

The benefit of permanent prompts depends on the extent to which their use is generalized. Previous research has demonstrated both control by and efficacy of pictorial prompts (e.g., Phillips & Vollmer, 2012). The present studies similarly evaluated stimulus control by textual prompts. Six school aged children with intellectual disabilities were taught to complete four 5-step instructional sets under the control of textual prompts. All 6 subjects showed some generalization to the final set. The results suggest that training served 1 of 3 purposes: (a) established control by the textual prompts or the ordinal sequence thereof, (b) addressed a reading deficit, or (c) addressed the lack of a motivating operation during baseline. Training a single task sequence may not be sufficient for acquisition of generalized textual instruction-following. However, establishing appropriate stimulus control by the textual prompts may facilitate acquisition of a generalized repertoire.