Conyers, C., Doole, A., Vause, T., Harapiak, S., Yu, D. C. T., & Martin, G. L. (2002).
Predicting the relative efficacy of three presentation methods for assessing preferences of persons with developmental disabilities.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,
35, 49-58.
Choices were presented to 9 individuals with developmental
disabilities using a two-choice format. Each pair of items,
selected based on prior preference assessment, was presented to
each participant in three conditions (actual items, pictures of
the items, and spoken-name presentation) using a reversal design.
The evaluation was conducted using food items, and was then
repeated using nonfood items. The participants were also given a
test to measure their skills on discrimination tasks ranging in
difficulty from simple to conditional discriminations. The
participants' abilities to make consistent choices with food and
nonfood items were predicted, with 94% accuracy, by their
discrimination skills. The findings suggest that presentation
methods can affect the accuracy of a choice assessment, and that
the systematic assessment of basic discrimination skills can be
used to predict the effectiveness of different presentation
methods in this population.
DESCRIPTORS: _developmental disabilities, preference assessment,
discrimination assessment, ABLA test