Discrete Trial Training

Discrete trial training is a highly structured teaching method within applied behavior analysis, developed and popularized by the Norwegian-American psychologist O. Ivar Lovaas at the University of California, Los Angeles beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, most closely associated with his early, intensive behavioral intervention programs for young children with autism, including his widely cited 1987 outcome study. Each discrete trial consists of a clear, brief instruction or discriminative stimulus presented by the instructor, the learner's response to it, and an immediate consequence, reinforcement following a correct response or a corrective prompt following an incorrect one, with a short pause separating one trial from the next. Complex skills, such as language, imitation, or self-care tasks, are broken down into small, individually teachable components and taught through many repeated trials until the learner reaches a set level of mastery, with the level of prompting gradually reduced, or faded, as independent performance improves. Because it allows precise, repeatable measurement of a learner's responses trial by trial, discrete trial training became one of the most widely used and researched teaching methods in special education programs for students with autism spectrum disorder and other developmental disabilities, particularly within early intensive behavioral intervention.