Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, EDU Physical Activity and Educational Services

Graduated guidance is a response prompting and fading procedure that incorporates physical prompts in the transfer of stimulus control. It is a unique procedure in that it does not have specific criteria or guidelines for changing prompt level, instead relying on the student as an indicator of when and how to prompt. Because of its flexibility, it would be beneficial to determine how it is being defined and utilized in the literature, to develop an operational definition and prompting guidelines, and to compare it to other effective prompting procedures. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to operationalize graduated guidance as a prompting procedure, and to compare it to most-to-least prompting with a delay in the acquisition of daily living skills for five individuals with significant disabilities. An adapted alternating treatments design was used across two sets of participants with prompting strategies counterbalanced across tasks. Results demonstrated that both prompting procedures led to improvements for all tasks. However, of the four tasks that reached mastery criterion, three were taught using graduated guidance. In addition, graduated guidance resulted in fewer trials to mastery, fewer errors, fewer intrusive prompts, and fewer overall prompts as compared to most-to-least prompting with a delay. Areas for future research and implications for practice were outlined as well.

Committee: Helen Cannella-Malone (Advisor); Moira Konrad (Committee Member); Diane Sainato (Committee Member) Subjects: Special Education