Using Distractors

Distractors are used to teach the skill of discrimination in a scaffolded manner. When introducing distractors the following needs to be considered:

• the initial distractor should be non-preferred and very different in appearance, touch and sound or blank

• once distractor(s) are introduced use blocking to ensure that the student successfully matches the two objects that are the same

• work up to including 3 distractors of increasing similarity to the object/card to be matched

• the student has achieved this task when they are capable of matching an object 1:1 from a choice of 4 similar objects such as red car to red car with orange, yellow and pink cars as distractors.