…..Using Discrete Trials

You have decided to teach your program via Discrete Trials. Please follow the subsequent instruction for completing the Program set-up for a Discrete Trial BTI program.

• Select the type of DTT you wish to run from the drop down at the Trial Options area. You can select “none”, “distributed trials”, or “mass trials”.
  • If you select “none”, then you need to check off the box next to Incidental. This will ensure that your program will be placed in the Incidental Programs area of the iPad. Please note: you can place a program in Incidental Programs OR in a Category for Teaching, but not both.
  • If you select “distributed trials”, ….this category is for when you are teaching more than one program at a time in the same routine. By placing multiple programs in the same routine into Distributed Trials, the system will create one program within that routine called Distributed Trials. The system will also distribute the targets across all of those programs for you.
  • If you select “mass trials”, ….all of the targets in that program will be run consecutively. If you want these to be presented in a random order, please check off the Random Rotation box further down the screen.

• For Training Set Number, enter the number that corresponds to the set/field number that you want to teach. If you want to teach the items in more than one set number, these can be entered as “1,2,3”, etc.

• In the Trials Per Day for Training Set, enter the number of trials that you want to run for the set number(s) you have selected. So if you have selected one set number to be trained and you enter 10 for the trials per day, then the iPad will show 10 trials for the item(s) listed in that selected set number. In the same way, if you enter 3 sets in the training set numbers field, and you enter 10 trials in the trials per day field, the iPad will divide the number of trials across those 3 sets. For example, it could be 3 trials from set one, 3 trials from set 2, and 4 trials from set 3. If you are using Distributed Trials, please remember that the total number of trials will be a sum of all the trials/day that you have set across all the programs in distributed trials.

• Example 1

In the above example, mass trials has been selected for sets 1 and 2. This means that the targets listed in Set Field 1 and Set Field 2 will be presented on the iPad (meow and woof). Ten trials will be presented and they will be randomly rotated in presentation order between the stimuli in Set Field 1 and Set Field 2.

• Example 2

Program 1

Program 2

Set fields are the same for both programs:

In this distributed trial example, 20 trials will be presented on the iPad (10 from each program). Those trials will be presented in a random order.