Evaluation of a self-instructional manual for conducting paired-stimulus preference assessment with individuals with developmental disabilities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ample research has shown that direct preference assessment is an effective method for identifying reinforcers for people with developmental disabilities with limited communication skills. Research has also shown that self-instructional manuals are an effective and efficient means for teaching individuals to implement a variety of procedures with individuals with developmental disabilities. I prepared a self-instructional manual to teach individuals to conduct a paired-stimulus (PS) direct preference assessment procedure. I used a concurrent modified multiple-baseline design across participants, combined with an unbalanced crossover design between groups, to evaluate the effectiveness of the manual to teach staff and university students to conduct the assessment. The manual was compared to a description of the assessment procedure adapted from the method sections of published research articles. Four university students and six staff members who work with individuals with developmental disabilities participated. None of the participants had previous experience conducting direct preference assessments. No participant met mastery criterion during simulated preference assessments before training. All participants met mastery criterion (80% correct or higher during a PS preference assessment) after studying the self-instructional manual. No participants met mastery after studying the method description adapted from published studies; participants subsequently met mastery criteria following study of the manual. Across all phases of the study, staff members performed with slightly higher accuracy than students. Training time required to master the self-instructional manual averaged 43 min. Participants’ performance remained at high levels during follow-up and generalization sessions. Participants also rated the self-instructional manual more favourably than the method description on a social validity questionnaire. The self-instructional manual offers an efficient, low-cost alternative to face-to-face training for teaching individuals to conduct paired-stimulus preference assessments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".