5 Things You Need to Know About Gaining a Learner's Attention in DTT

Continuing on with the discussion of discrete trial training (DTT), I'm going to dissect the 6 parts of a discrete trial that I talked about in the last post and hopefully give some food for thought about each step. Then I'm going to come back to how we decide when and how to use DTT as a strategy and deciding what to teach and how to present it.

One of the most important elements of DTT is making sure that you have the learner's attention BEFORE you administer the trial. For simple trials, that means making sure that the student is listening to your direction. In order to do that, we usually start working with a student by teaching them to attend to the teacher. Most, if not all, curricula for DTT start with this skill along with following one-step directions and other basic learning skills. We often refer to these skills as learning readiness skills because they are skills that a learner needs in order to learn. If you aren't attending to the direction, you won't be able to follow it. Similarly, you have to be attending to the materials. So it's more than just looking at the instructor--it's knowing when to look at the instructor (e.g., for a verbal direction) and when to look at the materials. There are more complex types of observation as well like knowing what parts of the materials to base the answer on and which are the important ones in helping make a differentiation between materials (e.g., between a pear and a cow). I'll get to those later in the series. For today I want to focus on how we get that initial attention. Here are 5 things to assure you have the student's attention.

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