Final answer:
After presenting a discriminative stimulus with an echoic prompt and the student responds correctly, the teacher should gradually fade the prompt. This step is part of shaping behavior through operant conditioning, leading to independent correct responding.
Step-by-step explanation:
In a transfer trial within an educational setting, after a teacher presents the discriminative stimulus with an echoic prompt and the student responds correctly, the next step for the teacher will be to gradually fade the prompt. This approach is consistent with an operant conditioning technique where the teacher reinforces successively closer approximations of the desired behavior until the prompt is no longer needed, and the student can respond correctly to the discriminative stimulus alone.
Initially, the teacher reinforces any response that resembles the target behavior. As the student gets closer to the desired behavior, the teacher reinforces more precise responses, gradually moving towards the end goal. Therefore, over time, the teacher should continue to fade the prompt to eventually reinforce only the desired behavior without any prompts, hence facilitating an independent and correct response to the discriminative stimulus.