A comparison of staff training procedures to teach flexible prompt fading

Quality behavior intervention requires critical thinking skills, in-the-moment analysis, flexibility, and clinical judgment. Yet, there has been limited research on developing these complex skills. Flexible prompt fading (FPF) is a prompting procedure that requires the interventionist to continually analyze learner responding and make in-the-moment decisions to maximize learning during the teaching session, ultimately using clinical judgment while using prompting as a teaching strategy. FPF has consistently been demonstrated to be effective and in some cases more efficient than other prompting procedures. However, there has been no research demonstrating effective training procedures for the skills necessary to implement FPF. In order to more widely disseminate procedures that require these analytic skills, effective training procedures must be identified. The current study evaluated the effects of behavioral skills training (BST) and a progressive approach to staff training to teach staff to implement FPF with autistic individuals/individuals with ASD and the effects of each training method on development of clinical judgment skills. The results demonstrated that both training procedures were effective in teaching implementation of FPF.