Comparison of Progressive Time Delay and Transition-Based Teaching with Preschoolers Who Have Developmental Delays

A progressive time delay procedure in one-to-one instructional sessions using massed-trial presentation was compared to transition-based teaching that involved distributed trials presented during transitions from one activity to another. Four preschool children with developmental delays were taught to read words and name letters/numerals and to produce manual signs for photographs. The classroom teacher conducted one daily massed-trial session with each student using progressive time delay for a set of behaviors, and provided an equal number of distributed trials at transition times to each student with a transition-based teaching procedure for another set of behaviors. The procedures were compared on the number of children meeting criterion (effectiveness) and on the number of trials and errors to criterion and the percentage of errors to criterion (efficiency). The parallel treatments design was used to evaluate the two instructional strategies. The results indicated that (a) both procedures were implemented reliably, (b) both procedures were effective in establishing criterion level performance, and (c) no substantial differences existed on the efficiency measures, although the number and percentage of errors were slightly higher for 3 of the 4 children with the transition-based teaching procedure. Implications for practice and future research are described.