In higher education, instruction that incorporates effective performance skills training is vital to equipping pre-service teachers with the tools they will use to educate children. This study evaluated the effects of behavioral skills training (BST) on performance of evidence-based practices by undergraduate pre-service special education teachers. A prepost design was used to evaluate performance during roleplay. BST sessions produced higher levels of correct performance than baseline measures across all seven participants. We discuss limitations of these results with suggestions for future research, along with recommendations for incorporating BST into university settings.

Matrix training is an intervention that systematically programs for the occurrence of generative outcomes, mostly in the area of language. A literature search identified studies that evaluated matrix training with individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Based on 12 reviewed studies, we asked questions regarding participant characteristics, targeted skills, matrix designs, evidence-based teaching strategies, percentage of learning that occurred through direct teaching and recombinative generalization, and the quality of the studies. With 29 total participants, mostly preschool and elementary ages, the most common teaching strategy implemented was a discrete trial training paradigm targeting language development. Overall, findings suggest that matrix training produced an average of 69% of learning without direct teaching across the areas of language, play, sentence construction, and spelling.

A web-based program was developed to conduct brief multiple-stimulus without replacement preference assessments for videos (e.g., movies, cartoons, music videos). The preference assessment program was used with two populations: young adults with developmental disabilities and school-age children with emotional and behavioral needs. Stimulus preference hierarchies were identified for all participants, indicating that a web-based preference assessment procedure is an efficient procedure for isolating highly preferred videos, which might be useful as reinforcers in a variety of settings.

Matrix training is a teaching strategy designed to facilitate generative responding through a process termed recombinative generalization. A skill that has yet to be addressed with matrix training is tacting time increments.Given the two-component features of time telling (i.e., hours and minutes) and the numerous teaching targets, matrix training was implemented for such behavior with two adults with developmental disabilities. This study used a 12 × 12 matrix that consisted of 144 time increments.Participants were taught 12 time increments, and probes were conducted to assess the remaining 132 untrained time increments. The participants responded correctly to approximately 50% of the untrained time increments during the post-assessment phase. Limitations and future research are discussed.

Although matrix training is an intervention technique designed to promote generative language, it has not been applied widely to toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) despite the benefits it may have for this young population. We investigated the use of matrix training to teach generative receptive language to toddlers with ASD and other language delays. Three participants were systematically taught to respond to instructions organized in action-object instruction matrices. Recombinative generalization probes were administered to determine if untrained action-object instruction following occurred without direct teaching in a multiple probe design. Although recombinative generalization was partial, approximately 30% of the learned action-object instructions occurred through direct teaching, whereas the other 70% of learning occurred through generalization. Matrix training provided a systematic teaching framework for facilitating generative language learning.