A prompt is an extra antecedent stimulus that encourages a person to engage in a particular behaviour.
A prompt is typically given at the same time or just after the target antecedent SD and it helps to cue the correct response from a learner.
Imagine a Spanish teacher working with a student called Bert. She wants to teacher her student to answer the question ??C?mo te llamas?? which means ?What is your name?? in Spanish.
She presents the SD ??C?mo te llamas?? then immediately follows it by saying ?Me llamo Bert?.
Bert echoes the phrase ?Me llamo Bert? and his teacher praises him.
In this case, the teacher knew that Bert was capable of echoing her response. So she used an echoic prompt to help him respond correctly. Over time, she might fade from heavy prompting (giving a full echoic prompt) to medium prompting (giving a partial echoic prompt) to giving no prompting.
There are lots of different types of prompts but the two main categories are Response Prompts and Simulus Prompts.
Response Prompts
A response prompt is an additional stimulus that evokes a desired behaviour and that takes the form of another person?s behaviour. Physical prompts, gestural prompts, modelling prompts and verbal prompts are all types of response prompts.
A physical prompt is a type of prompt where somebody physically helps a learner to engage in the correct behaviour at the right time. For example, an occupational therapist might physically prompt a learner to make the movements required to catch a ball.
A gestural prompt is a type of prompt where a teacher uses a gesture to indicate a correct response. For example, if a special education teacher was trying to teach somebody to discriminate between health and unhealthy foods, she might start by placing an example of each on a table (e.g. French fries and salad), asking the learner to point to the healthy one and then quickly pointing to the salad.
A model prompt is a demonstration of a target behaviour by an instructor. A parent might ask a child to ?Show me brushing your teeth? before modelling the correct response for their son or daughter.
A verbal prompt is a type of response prompt where the verbal behaviour of the instructor lets the learner know what the correct response is. For example, if a child was learning to play snakes and ladders and then landed on the snake, their brother or sister telling them to go down the ladder would be a type of verbal prompt.
Stimulus Prompts
When using a stimulus prompt, an instructor makes some change to a stimulus, or adds/removes a stimulus in order to make a correct response more likely. It can involve a change to the SD (or the S-Delta) that makes the correct response more obvious to the learner. There are two main categories of stimulus prompt ? the within stimulus prompt and the extrastimulus prompt.
When using a within stimulus prompt, you change the position or some dimension of an SD in some way that makes correct responding easier.
For example, if teaching a child goal keeping skills, you might initially kick the ball to them lightly (with low intensity) to make it easier for them to stop the ball.
Similarly, a teacher who wanted to teach a child to identify a cat, might present an array of three animals and position the picture of the cat one-inch closer. This is called a positional prompt.
Likewise, a teacher might give a student a learning comprehension task ? a brief passage followed by some questions. If the information required to answer the question correctly was highlighted in bold in the passage, this would be another example of a within stimulus prompt because a dimension of the target SD has been altered to make correct responding more likely.
Extrastimulus prompts, as the same suggest, involves adding a stimulus to prompt the correct response. For example, if teaching somebody to complete a task such as a school morning routine, the addition of a visual schedule would be considered an extra-stimulus prompt.
Summary
To recap, a prompt is an extra antecedent stimulus that encourages a person to engage in a particular behaviour. A response prompt evokes the correct response by another person?s behaviour (gestural, physical, verbal and model prompts while a stimulus prompt evokes a correct response to a target SD by changing some aspect of its physical properties or by adding something to the learning environment.