Abstract:

Under the background of the continuous increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) year by year as well as policy promotion and institutional guarantee of the inclusive education mode of learning in regular class, which covered every children with any kind of disability, children with ASD has become the new growth point of this kind of inclusive education. More and more autistic children are going to regular schools, although there was no accurate data on children with autism attending regular classes in China. However, the fact was that regular education teachers were generally lack of knowledge and skills in ASD and evidence-based educational interventions, which seriously undermines the results of this kind of inclusion education for these children. Setting up practice-oriented general education courses related to evidence-based education interventions in normal universities and providing pre-service teachers of autistic children with knowledge of evidence-based education interventions and cultivating their ability to faithfully implement these methods was an important entry point to fundamentally reverse this situation. The reality of both class periods being less and education internship opportunities being relative lack, made the question how practice-oriented general curriculum teaching can promote related teachers to take effective and efficient means of training or technology, which will assist pre-service teachers with autonomously learning evidence-based education interventions so that they can implement them with high fidelity, became the primary real problem today’s normal universities must be responded.

Among thousands of evidence-based interventions, the Discrete Trial Teaching (DTT) got its evidence-based position for double advantage. First, All kinds of children, including the autistics and even their typical peers, could get many gains from the experiences of DTT intervention. The significant intervention improvements was occurred in areas such as intellectual skills, daily living skills, recognition and language skills, Motor and imitation skills, Symptoms of autism, problem behaviors, the numbers of supportive needs and so on. Besides this benefit to children with ASD, another advantage of DTT was it can be mastered and implemented with high fidelity by variety of stakeholders, including pre-service teachers from variety of contexts, such as school, community, institution, clinics and families and so on. It is therefore imperative for the pre-service teachers to find an efficient and effective self-instruction procedure based on their daily learning environment, help them acquire the core knowledge and skills of DTT, and enable them to apply these knowledge and skills to the life of autistic children for the sake of solving practical problems. In addition, do the advantages of channel effect and asynchronous training strategies still exist stably in the self-instruction of DTT skills of these pre-service teachers? The question remains untested.

In order to answer these questions, based on the existing researches, and with more detailed and intuitive real teaching videos replacing animation materials of relevant studies, the current study attempted to use pre-service teachers who never contacted with children with ASD as participants to exam what influences will be brought by different presenting modes of learning materials on their acquisition of DTT. By means of separately applying a self-paced repeating loop procedure of “learning→test→answer→feedback” and a role playing plus a self-paced repeating loop procedure of “learning→test→answer→feedback”, researchers conducted three experiments, respectively exploring what kinds of knowledge learning effect and practical operation transformation effect that pre-service teachers will perform, under the visual single-channel pattern (word, PPT) and audio-visual dual-channel pattern (real teaching video).

Experiment 1 recruited 24 students from Northwest Normal University, and tested the effect of audiovisual dual-channel materials on the DTT learning effect of pre-service teachers from the perspective of the presentation models of learning materials. Experiment 2 repeated the general method of Experiment 1 with another 24 participants recruited from the same university, aiming at exploring whether the distribution way of the test materials would affect the results of the Experiment 1. Considering that DTT is a very practical skill, researchers conducted Experiment 3 with another 6 participants, with the purpose of exploring whether audiovisual dual-channel materials had learning advantages at the level of practice application.

The results of Experiment 1 showed that the presentation models of learning materials had a significant impact on the independent learning effect of pre-service teachers in Discrete Trial Teaching: The audio-visual dual-channel material (real teaching video) which is composed of “subtitle + picture + sound explanation” produced the most desirable results (p < 0.05, Table 1). Between the rest two of visual single-channel materials, the PPT material which is composed of “text + image” had a slight advantage over the Word text material. The result of Experiment 2 was consistent with that of Experiment 1, which excluded the influence of the distribution of test materials on the experimental results (p < 0.05, Table 2). At the same time, it was further verified that PPT material had more advantages than Word text material. The results of Experiment 3 further proved that the advantages of real teaching videos were still existed, F(2, 4) = 30.33, p < 0.001, η² = 0.86 (see Figure 1, Table 3).

These findings suggested that the effective and efficient way for pre-service teachers to learn Discrete Trial Teaching will appear at the moment when the learning content was presented in audio-visual dual channels, both at the level of theory learning (Experiment 1, Experiment 2, Experiment 3) and implementation (Experiment 3). The field of pre-service teachers' evidence-based practices training also has modality effect. The real instruction video had learning advantage, regardless of its level of declarative knowledge or operational and procedural knowledge for evidence-based practices. Besides enriching the existing research literature, the implications of these findings were as followed: (1) provided further supporting evidence for the existence of modality effects; (2) extended modality effects into the learning field of evidence-based practices; (3) brought certain inspiration and practical value to teaching reform and innovation for pre-service teachers' capacity of evidence-based education; (4) lay a foundation for improving the quality and level of inclusion education for children with ASD on the supply side of the universities that cultivate teachers for the first line of education systems.

Key words: pre-service teachers, discrete trial teaching, autism spectrum disorder, modality effect, inclusion education, Self-directed learning, evidence-based practices