Teaching Response Prompting Strategies to Special Education Teachers in Tanzania

Students with moderate and severe disabilities benefit from systematic instruction such as response prompting strategies, but unfortunately many special education teachers have not received training on this kind of specialized instruction. Response prompting strategies are considered an effective practice in the US, but there were found no published studies on their use in an African context. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a training package on the acquisition, maintenance and generalization of Tanzanian special education teachers' use of response prompting strategies. A multiple baseline across participants design was used to examine the effectiveness of a training package that included explanation, role-play, classroom practice with immediate corrective feedback, and intermittent presentation of sample instructional programs. Participants were 5 special education teachers and 19 students with moderate to severe disabilities. The primary dependent variable was the teachers' accuracy of implementing 4 response prompting strategies (constant time delay, simultaneous prompting, most-to-least prompting and system of least prompts). The secondary dependent variable was student performance on targeted skills. The training package was effective in teaching all the teachers to acquire, generalize and maintain the strategies. Student performance results are mixed, with all students improving relative to baseline and 8 of 19 students mastering their target skills. Social validity data indicate that that the training package and strategies were appropriate for the context.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Special Education

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Seward, Jannike Jakobsen

Contributors dc:contributor

• James Halle
• Janis Chadsey

• Education, Teacher Training

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3337918

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/80067