A Comparison of Two Procedures for Teaching Discrimination Skills to Down's Syndrome and Non‐handicapped Children

S ummary . Two different strategies for teaching discrimination to Down's Syndrome (DS) and non‐handicapped children were compared for relative efficiency: trial‐and‐error and errorless learning. Two types of discrimination tasks were used, shape and nonsense figure tasks. A pre‐test was used to match children for pre‐existing ability. Errorless learning proved to be the superior training strategy in each group, both during training and in post‐tests. DS children responded poorly to trial‐and‐error training in both absolute and relative terms. Although order of presentation of training conditions had little effect on performance in the non‐handicapped group, an interesting differential effect emerged in the DS group: initial trial‐and‐error training adversely affected subsequent performance in the errorless task while initial errorless experience enhanced subsequent trial‐and‐error performance. It would appear from these results that errorless learning may be useful as a “primer”, increasing motivation to learn in more conventional learning situations

Cognitive psychology · Developmental psychology · Nonsense · Task (project management) · Behavioral and Psychological Studies · Down syndrome and intellectual disability research · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Psychology