Effects of Feedback Statements on Staff Procedural Integrity

ABSTRACT

Supervisor feedback is a powerful and effective tool that can be used to improve employee performance. However, there is a lack of information regarding the essential components of supervisor feedback. This study investigated the effects of the number and type of feedback statements provided by a supervisor on the procedural fidelity of discrete trial training (DTT) of Registered Behavior Technicians implementing applied behavior analysis procedures with children in the home setting. Sequenced verbal corrective-corrective, corrective-corrective- corrective, positive-positive, and positive-positive-positive statements were provided as consequences during the implementation of a receptive identification two-dimensional picture card program. Results showed that all conditions increased procedural fidelity of DTT, with the positive-positive-positive condition producing slightly higher performance. Social acceptability measures indicated a preference for corrective over positive feedback.

KEYWORDS:

• corrective feedback
• feedback sequence
• feedback statements
• performance
• positive feedback

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The underlying and extended data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework at, http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/VPEMF, Procedural Fidelity of DTT Across Feedback Conditions. The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Ethical approval

All procedures involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution. It was approved by the University of Kansas Human Research Protection Program Institutional Review Board (IRB ID 00146424). Department of Applied Behavioral Science, University of Kansas.

Notes

1. When describing published research, we use the term adopted by the authors of the manuscript.

2. The first five trials of each research opportunity was an untargeted set of picture cards which could not be associated with feedback because feedback was provided as a consequence.