Beyond the tablet: teaching, practice and observation in one record

Some important learning happens on a tablet. Some happens with a card on a table, a spoken cue, a toy, a request or a behavior that lasts twenty minutes.

A system becomes less useful, not more scientific, when it calls all of those things “trials” and turns them all into percent correct. Interlaza supports several session shapes and keeps their meanings distinct.

SessionKinds groups sessions by what they can claim about the response — Scored, Practice or Observation — not by activity. Off-tablet MTS and free-operant teaching produce Scored or Practice sessions; free-operant count and duration produce Observation sessions; and stimulus–stimulus pairing sits outside all three, because it asks the child for no response at all.

Trial-based work away from the screen

In off-tablet MTS, the Instructor presents physical cards or objects while the Tap Pad’s recording screen shows what comes next — the same screen free-operant teaching uses below, told apart by what each trial asks rather than by a separate app. Each discrete response can be recorded as independent, prompted, incorrect or no response, with the relevant prompt information attached.

The value is practical: the adult can keep attention on the learner while Interlaza preserves the trial sequence. A program can therefore move between pictures on a screen and materials in the room without returning to paper and later transcription. It is reached from Add activity → What do you want to do? → Teach → Where does the child act? → With objects or cards.

Verbal operants need a vocal prompt hierarchy

Free-operant teaching removes the array of choices and opens from the same door as off-tablet MTS. The adult arranges or presents a cue and records the child’s response — for example an echoic, mand, tact or intraverbal.

Interlaza’s free-operant mode is built to record spoken targets specifically. Verbal operants in the wider Skinnerian sense are not limited to speech — a sign or a selection on an augmentative and alternative communication device is a verbal operant too — but this mode’s vocal prompt hierarchy is not built to score those yet.

Because the target here is spoken behavior, the prompt hierarchy is vocal: full model, partial model, mouthing and gestural support. A motor hierarchy copied from card matching would describe the wrong event. Prompted and approximated responses remain visible as teaching information; they do not silently satisfy an independent criterion.

Interlaza can also schedule an unprompted transfer check after supported responding. That makes the useful question explicit: did the response appear when the help was no longer there?

Observation is not a failed teaching session

When the question is “how often?”, the Instructor uses a free-operant count, reached from Add activity → Only observe and count → What do you want to measure?. Interlaza records occurrences and the observation window, then reports count and rate. Under a very short window that rate carries too much uncertainty to act on, and Interlaza says so instead of guessing: below ten seconds of observation it reports no rate at all.

When the question is “for how long?”, duration mode times episodes, behind the same Only observe and count door. It keeps both total duration and duration per occurrence because one twenty-minute episode and twenty one-minute episodes have the same total and suggest different decisions. Episodes still open when the clock ends are closed, not discarded.

Neither activity has correct answers, prompts, mastery or BKT. Showing “0% accuracy” would not be conservative; it would be false.

A session in which no response is requested

Stimulus–stimulus pairing is different again, and it lives behind the same Only observe and count door. The Instructor types a target sound — a recombination of sounds the child already produces in free play, not one chosen at random (says “bo” and “ca” but never “ba”? “ba” is a candidate) — waits for the planned interval and then delivers a preferred item. The item arrives whatever the child does.

There is no instruction to respond, no error correction and no score. Interlaza keeps the forward order fixed because changing the order would change the procedure itself.

Why this matters when choosing software

Families and Instructors should not need one app for tablet trials, a stopwatch for duration, a counter for rate and a spreadsheet to reunite the week. But “all in one” only helps if each measure keeps meaning exactly what it means.

Interlaza’s advantage is that different work can remain different and still belong to one learner’s record, without forcing everything to look alike.