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Daniel M. Fienup

Researcher

Jun 12, 2026

8:27
... before we, you know, kinda delve into the topic more deeply?
8:30
Yeah.
8:31
So I guess one point I guess I wanna start out with, so we can talk about the components of these, but I think one of the things that has come out through our conversations is that we kind of dislike the calling it mastery.
8:44
Like when you talk about mastery outside of what we're doing, people think of like, you know, professional sports players as like masters of their craft.
8:52
You know, there's books out there about, you know, how you need ten thousand hours of practice with something to become a master.
8:59
And then when-- where we as a field use it most is while we're teaching, which means we're providing high rates of reinforcement [clears throat], you usually our criteria are below a hundred percent, meaning that there may be some error correction or prompting that actually occurred on a couple of trials.
9:17
And then when a kid reaches these performance criteria, we go, "Wow, they mastered it." And we say, "Well, that's a terrible time to say that the behavior's been mastered because it's, you know, it's in a fake environment still, a fake kind of teaching, kind of coddled environment." And so then to say, "Well, that kid's mastered it," you know, I don't know if the kid's really mastered it at that point by any kind of common understanding of the term mastery.

23 MINS LATER

32:47
Oh, okay
31:36
Dan, since you created that figure.
31:39
Yeah.
31:40
So you have to think about it as two five-second periods.
31:43
So what we're trying to do is get the kid to engage with the book and then deliver reinforcers that are paired with the kid's book engagement.
31:53
And then once we've seen that behavior for five seconds, now we want to see Does that behavior continue if we withhold that reinforcement? And that's our test.
32:02
And that's actually what we're going to plot on a graph.
32:05
If after we've paired reinforcement for five seconds, they continue to engage in the book for another five seconds, then we say, look at that.

7 MINS LATER

39:01
So I'm going to give you the opportunity to share that.

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