What are Prompts?
Prompts are “instructions, gestures, demonstrations, touches, or other things that we arrange or do to increase the likelihood that children will make correct responses.” Prompts (Billingsley & Romer, 1983; Snell, 1983a) are also supplementary stimuli used to increase the likelihood that a student will emit a correct response in the presence of the SD (instruction) which will eventually control the behavior. Prompts are given before or during the performance of a behavior; they help behavior occur so that the teacher can provide reinforcement. Some examples of prompts:
- verbal prompts/verbal directions
- modeling (modeling the behavior for the student so that it can be imitated)
- physical guidance (student bodily assisted through an action)
- movement cues (gesturing, looking at, touching the correct response)
- positional cues (positioning the correct choice closer to the student)
- Redundancy cues (when one or more stimulus/response dimensions are paired with the correct choice (i.e. changing the color, size, or shape of the target item).
Why do we use Prompts?
Prompts usually go hand-in-hand with errorless teaching. There are many benefits to this approach such as (Kosky Deskin, 2013):
- The utilization of prompts is a positive way of teaching and therefore encourages learning because students continually make progress.
- When the word “no” is overused, learners can easily become desensitized to it. Using an errorless approach, “no” is infrequently used and therefore still retains its meaning which is especially important in potentially dangerous situations.
- Since there are so many different types of prompts, there is a wide selection from which to choose to accommodate different learning styles and abilities.