Effects of mastery criteria on skill maintenance

Abstract

There is currently limited research detailing the effects of varying mastery criteria on skill maintenance for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Mastery criteria are used to determine whether a skill has been acquired and is typically based on a criterion of accuracy observed over a number of consecutive sessions. Results from a survey of BCBAs reveal that 80 percent accuracy across three consecutive therapy sessions is the most used mastery criteria (Richling, S. M., Williams, W. L., and Carr, J. E. (2019), which presumes that this criterion is a minimum standard for skill maintenance. However, there is currently no research on the effects of different mastery criteria on the maintenance of functional skills for children with ASD in a clinical setting. The goal of this study was to determine whether the often-used mastery criteria of 80 percent accuracy across three consecutive sessions is the mastery criteria that should be used in clinical practice when compared to other similar criteria by examining the maintenance of skills over time, across participants, skills, and mastery criteria. Specifically, this study examined whether the mastery criteria of 60, 80, or 100 percent accuracy across three consecutive sessions is efficient for maintaining a set of varying acquisitional skills for five weeks across participants in a clinical setting by measuring the number of sessions to obtain the mastery criterion and the percentage of loss of maintenance. Results from this study indicate that the 60 percent mastery criterion took fewer sessions to achieve mastery, generated a greater instructional efficiency, and demonstrated similar loss of maintenance to the 80 and 100 percent mastery criterion.