Association for Behavior Analysis International

Since Sidman and colleagues landmark studies on stimulus equivalence were published over 40 years ago, stimulus equivalence procedures have been used to effectively build novel and complex behavioral repertoires in both typical adults and children (e.g., Fields, Reeve, Adams, & Verhave, 1991; Connell & Witt, 2004; Lynch & Cuvo, 1995; Ramirez & Rehfeldt, 2009) and individuals diagnosed with developmental disabilities (e.g., LeBlanc, Miguel, Cummings, Goldsmith, & Carr, 2003; Rosales & Rehfeldt, 2007). In this symposium, four papers that used EBI to teach socially relevant stimulus classes or concepts across a variety of learners will be presented. One study evaluated the use of EBI to teach identification of emotions by young learners with autism. The second study used EBI to teach the mathematical concept of multiplication to typical third grade children. The third study taught college students to form derived relations among representations of musical symbols and to play the piano in the presence of these stimuli. The last study investigated the teaching of verbal operants, typical of those found in ABA coursework, to graduate students. Collectively, these studies extend the scope of complex behavioral repertoires that can be taught to a wide variety of learners using EBI.

Stimulus equivalence-based instruction is an efficient and economical way to teach complex repertoires, and has been used to teach learners of different intellectual functioning levels and ages. In this study, EBI was used to teach the mathematical concept of multiplication to six elementary school aged learners. A pretest-training-posttest-maintenance design was used. Participants lacked multiplication skills during the paper-and-pencil, oral facts assessment, and computerized pretests. Next, participants were trained using a match-to-sample procedure via a computer program. During match-to-sample trials, sample stimuli were presented followed by four comparisons in which one was the correct response. Four classes were trained. The stimuli in each class consisted of graphical representations, multiplication and addition facts, and the correct product. Following training, all participants demonstrated acquisition of trained relations, as well as the remaining untaught relations among the multiplication stimuli. Additionally, all participants demonstrated generalization and maintenance of both taught and untaught emergent relations in a follow up paper-and-pencil and oral multiplication fact assessments presented two weeks later.

In the research literature, few strategies have been investigated to teach behavior analytic concepts. The purpose of the present study was to compare the effects of stimulus equivalence procedures to a traditional study method when learning Skinner's taxonomy of verbal behavior. Graduate-level professionals participated via a web-based learning management system known as Desire2Learn (see http://www.desire2learn.com). Specifically, we used the stimulus equivalence paradigm to teach relations among the operant names, antecedents, consequences, and examples of each operant. The comparison group studied a portion of a chapter on verbal behavior (Cooper, Herron, & Heward, 2007). Generalization of responding to novel stimuli was assessed, as was the production of generative examples of verbal operants. On average, the participants in the equivalence group performed at a level that was 10 percentage points (i.e., a full letter grade) above that of the participants assigned to the traditional method of study. Thus, stimulus equivalence procedures can be used to effectively teach concepts related to Skinner's taxonomy of verbal behavior.