title: Relative effectiveness of various letter discrimination procedures in directionality pretraining.
abstract: Two investigations were conducted to provide information relevant to programming basic reading skills for retarded individuals. Both experiments utilized various procedures to teach subjects to discriminate between the letters b and d. The role of feedback and task format conditions was investigated in Experiment 1. Results indicated that two-choice discrimination learning was significantly more difficult than either oddity or matching-to-sample conditions. In Experiment 2 the effects of problem type and sample reduncancy were examined. Analyses indicated that simultaneous matching-to-sample procedures were significantly easier than successive matching-to-sample procedures. Performance with a delayed matching-to-sample transfer task did not reflect differential effects of training in either study.
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004495:Education of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011932:Reading