This method may also be used to obtain an accurate idea of whether the student's behavior is improving over time. The recording procedure you choose will depend on the kind of behavior demonstrated and type of information that would be most beneficial. Frequency recording is a simple counting of how many times a behavior occurs during a designated period of time. Those designated periods might be a minute, an hour, a day, or a week. Duration recording monitors the percent of time or the total time that a behavior occurs in a specified time period.
Interval recording is a shortcut procedure for estimating the duration of a behavior.
There are three types of interval recording. In partial interval recording, you mark whether the behavior occurred at least once during the short observation interval. In momentary time sampling , you look up immediately at pre-designated points and notice whether the behavior is occurring at that precise moment . In all three types, the teacher then figures the percent of observations that the behavior occurred. Interval recording is used for the same behaviors as duration recording, but this procedure takes less time and effort and does not require that the student be observed continually.