Teaching Children to Discriminate Letters of the Alphabet through Errorless Discrimination Training

Abstract

A group of 64 inner city preschool children was taught to discriminate letters of the alphabet using either an errorless discrimination training (EDT) approach or the traditional reinforcement-extinction approach. For the EDT group the distinctive feature of the letter to be discriminated was highlighted in red and as the training proceeded the red was gradually faded. Each group received ten training trials for each of two different letter combinations presented in a match-to-sample format. The results showed that the EDT group made significantly fewer errors during training and on the posttest compared to the reinforcement-extinction group.