Errorless learning refers to a variety of discrimination learning techniques that eliminate or minimize responding to incorrect choices. This article describes experimental roots of errorless learning and applied errorless strategies. Specifically, previous research on stimulus fading, stimulus shaping, response prevention, delayed prompting, superimposition with stimulus fading, and superimposition with stimulus shaping are discussed. Educational applications for children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) are presented for each technique so that school psychologists, educators, and teachers working with children with PDD can understand the underpinnings and practical applications of errorless techniques to use in skill acquisition programming in school settings. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Errorless learning represents a set of teaching procedures designed to reduce incorrect responding as the student gains mastery over the work materials. Errorless learning procedures are used to teach children a variety of novel tasks that almost always involve choosing one response over a second response. Examples of common tasks include teaching a child to choose sight words, colors, numbers, shapes, pictures, or objects when given multiple stimuli from which to choose. Errorless learning procedures are derived from an experimental learning literature. As such, a discussion of this early literature is crucial to understanding the modern application to teaching children without errors.
Trial-and-Error and Errorless Learning TheoryPeople learn simple and conditional discriminations in various ways. Through the early 1960s, published discrimination learning tasks shared a common feature. That is, organisms learned through "trial and error." Trial-and-error learning has been defined differently through the years, but each definition relates to the same basic arrangement. In trial-and-error discrimination tasks, the correct choice (Sϩ) and the incorrect choice (SϪ) are always presented together so that the arrangement of important stimulus materials is presented to the learner from the beginning and does not change throughout the learning task. For example, if a task is to teach a child to touch a red ball when presented with a red ball and a black block after hearing the verbal demand to "touch ball," the red ball and the black block are always paired together and the learner maintains the opportunity to select either one. Neither is larger or smaller, neither is farther or nearer to the learner, and no responses to either stimuli are blocked. The learner has equal opportunity to select the correct (Sϩ) or the incorrect (SϪ) choice.It was once believed that discrimination learning required the selection of both the correct (Sϩ) and incorrect (SϪ) so the learner could experience the consequences of each (Hull, 1950;Spence, 1936). Because differential consequences are programmed for either selection, learning can occur from correct or incorrect responses. In the above example of a conditional discrimination task where...
