Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium presents international research focused on the importance of quality in behavioural teaching for children with autism receiving Intensive Behavioural Intervention (IBI). Researchers in Canada (Blacklock et al.), Sweden (Langh & Bolte), England (Denne et al.), and Wales (Foran & Hoerger) will present four studies bearing on the issue of quality behavioural teaching and all making reference to the York Measure of Quality of IBI (YMQI; Perry, Flanagan, & Prichard, 2008) to assess the quality of teaching. Dr. Adrienne Perry (Canada) will chair and Dr. Richard Hastings (England) will serve as Discussant. Themes to be addressed in the symposium include: how characteristics of quality teaching can be grouped into factors or scores; how consistent quality teaching is over time; how training and supervision of teachers impact upon their attitudes towards IBI, their YMQI scores and on childrens progress; and the issue of quantity versus quality of behavioural teaching in relation to children's outcomes.

It appears trivial that expertise and belief in an intervention method is crucial for treatment success. However, these basic issues have been largely neglected in several IBI efficacy studies. In Sweden, IBI skill levels of preschool staff administering IBI is pretty unknown. In the scope of a larger project on IBI quality control and development using the YMQI, the objective of this study was to examine the level of basic ABA knowledge and the allegiance to the method in five groups: IBI experts, IBI supervised preschool teachers, preschool teachers without IBI, parents, and student controls (total N = 302) using a 27-item questionnaire including 15 multiple choice knowledge items on basic ABA principles as well as 12 allegiance items. MANOVA (F>8.2, p<.0001, eta2 =.10) and post-hoc Tukey tests (p<.03) showed that IBI experts showed higher IBI allegiance than both preschool teachers with and without supervision. IBI experts and IBI supervised preschool teachers showed comparable IBI knowledge, and higher knowledge than unsupervised preschool teachers. Findings indicate that IBI supervision of preschool teachers increases knowledge on the method, although not necessarily the trust in it.

With an increase in large scale Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) services for children with autism, the need to define and measure quality is essential. Staff competence is key and identifying and measuring this accurately is a critical aspect of service provision. ABA service providers use various ways of measuring competence including direct observation, video analysis, and written examination. However, apart from the York Measure of Quality of Intensive Behavioural Intervention (YMQI), there is an interesting lack of direct links between defining competencies and developing ways to assess them. In this study we used three measures of competencies developed from the UK ABA Autism Education Competence Framework Level 1. Along with the YMQI we assess their construct validity by comparing the performance of two groups of tutors working in a school for children with autism (experienced vs. inexperienced) and performance of the inexperienced group at baseline (T1) and following one year of competence based training (T2). Results revealed that the more experienced group in both the between-group and longitudinal comparisons achieved higher scores on 3 out of 4 measures suggesting that these work well as a means of measuring competence.