Using sequential analysis to assess component integrity of discrete-trial teaching programs

ABSTRACT

Treatment integrity is the extent to which interventionists implement treatment procedures as prescribed.  The majority of treatment integrity research involving discrete-trial teaching (DTT) reports an overall score summarizing integrity across procedural components.  Because DTT is a procedure consisting of multiple steps, practitioners may find it helpful to report integrity data separately for each component (i.e., component integrity).  Recent research has found that high levels of overall integrity are not always representative of high integrity for individual treatment components.  The purpose of this study was to assess component integrity of DTT programs occurring in the natural environment with a specific emphasis on identifying integrity errors for an error-correction procedure consisting of remedial trials.  The results showed that high overall levels of integrity did not correspond to high levels of integrity for the remedial trial portion of the error-correction procedures.  We discuss the implications of the results for research and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrete-trial teaching
• treatment integrity
• sequential analysis
• Markov transition matrix
• error-correction procedures

Acknowledgments

We thank the agencies, consultants, therapists, and learners (and their families) who participated in this research. We also want to acknowledge Dr. Oliver C. Mudford from the University of Auckland for co-supervising this study. The study was based on the dissertation submitted by the first author, supervised by the second author, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Auckland.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in this study.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.