USING STIMULUS EQUIVALENCE TECHNOLOGY TO TEACH RESEARCH DESIGN CONDITIONAL RELATIONS FOR UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a stimulus equivalence instructional package on undergraduates' performance in conditional discrimination tasks that involved research design names, definitions, notations, and examples. Participants were four undergraduate students whose primary language was Portuguese. Participants remained in the study only if their percentage of correct responses in Probes 1, 2, and 3 was lower than 20%. Thirty-six experimental stimuli were used in the study. They were comprised of nine research design names, nine research design definitions, nine research design notations, and nine examples presented in a matching to sample format during teaching and emergent relations sessions. Probes consisted of nine open-ended questions on the taught conditional relations and new examples. All participants learned all conditional relations, showed emergence of symmetric and transitive relations, and generalized from the selection-based tasks (multiple-choice tasks) to the topography-based tasks (open-ended probes). Lessons learned from this study can help in programming effective instruction for higher education settings.