Abstract

ORTIZ, Gerardo; GONZALEZ, Adriana; ROSAS, Melissa  and  ALCARAZ, Fernando. Effects of instruction accuracy and feedback density on following, elaborating and transmitting descriptions in conditonal discrimination tasks. Acta comport. [online]. 2006, vol.14, n.2, pp.103-130. ISSN 0188-8145.

To evaluate the effects of instructional specificity (specifíc vs. generic) and feedback density (none, continuous, or delayed) on instruction following and rule elaboration, 30 college students were randomly assigned to one of six experimental groups in order to perform a conditional discrimination task (first-order matching to sample) in Experiment 1. The results showed that instructional specificity and feedback density nave differential effects not only on the subject's performance, but also on the specificity and pertinence of the rules elaborated and in the correspondence between performance and the elaborated descriptions. In Experiment 2, we investigated the use of descriptions made by different subjects of the previous experiment as instructions of 30 undergraduate students. In general, we observed performances levels that oscillate between 12 correct responses and a wide sample of irrelevant descriptions. These results are discussed in terms of the correspondence between instructions, performance and descriptions in the transmission of descriptions, and the importance of the kind of protocol utilized to obtain those descriptions.

Keywords : Instruction; Rule; Descriptions; Cultural transmission; Matching-to-sample; Undergraduate students.

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