Comparison of delayed prompting and fading for teaching preschoolers easily confused letters & numbers

Two teaching strategies, delayed-prompting (Touchette, 1971) and fading (Egeland, 1975), were compared for teaching the most easily confused letters and numbers to preschoolers. One group of children received training using delayed prompting with a fixed delay, a second group with a fading procedure; third served as the control group that received no training. A derived progress score on the training stimuli was calculated by subtracting errors on a pretest from errors on the post-test Analysis of these results indicated a significant difference between the delayed-prompting group and the control group only. The delayed-prompting group showed greater progress. During training, subjects in the fading group met criterion on an average of 4.33 stimuli and the subjects in the delayed-prompting group met criterion on an average of 3.23 stimuli. However, on a criterion test and a posttest given 1 week later, the fading group made significantly more errors than the delayed-prompting group.