Association for Behavior Analysis International

An overview of ABA, its history, structures, and functions as an international locus of the field of behavior analysis. Awards, special interest groups, and other features will also be dealt with. Drs. Michael and Wood, two of ABA's original members, will review the origin and organization of ABA as well as describe the principles of behavior analysis that form the scientific foundation of the field.

In this address, Dr. Leslie Braksick will offer her perspective on the State of Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) from the consultant and clients point of view. As a behavioral leadership coach to Fortune 100 executives and as the Co-Founder and Chairman of the largest behaviorally-based consulting firm, Braksick has an important perspective on the world of work and the opportunities and challenges for OBM practitioners. Braksick will discuss current and emerging trends in business and the role of behavior analysis in those trends. She will highlight client examples where Fortune 100 companies are, today, relying on behavior analysis as their strategic weapon for high performance and competitive differentiation. She will also draw attention to clients who say they are focusing on behavior but, in reality, use programs that have no scientific underpinning. The voice of the client will be seen and heard using video technology. Finally, Braksick will offer her perspective on areas of needed study by OBM researchers as well as how the OBM network might better market their behavioral solutions.

Reflection, based on grounded theory and supported by research and the scientific method, is much more behavioral than constructivist. Despite this assertion, current priorities in teacher education posit that behavioral approaches are inadequate for defining the social and cognitive mediation necessary for teaching and learning in todays classrooms. Frequently, constructivist principles are advocated instead. In the second edition of The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education (Sikula, 1996), Constructivist Perspectives is one of eight subsections under Contemporary Conceptions of Learning to Teach. The others are Critical Perspectives, Teacher Reasoning, Pedagogical Content Knowledge, Multicultural Teacher Education, Global Teacher Education, Human Development, and Cognitive Instruction. Behaviorism and Behavior Analysis comprises a separate, stand alone section of this same book. It is telling that constructivist perspectives is listed as one among many in the handbook, while an entire section of the book is dedicated exclusively to behaviorism. Without behavioral approaches to teaching, all the requisite skills that students and teachers need to reflect and reason, such as active listening, attending to appropriate cues, clarifying and extending questions, paraphrasing, etc., could never occur. Nevertheless, the confusion continues. The purpose of this address is to engage the audience in a semantic and functional analysis of behavioral and constructivist approaches to teaching and learning.

Presentation of research conducted at the Claremont Autism Center that examines the acquisition and generalization of positive behaviors including social initiations and social skills. Studies to be discussed included a comparative analysis of generalization techniques, assessment of socio-communicative function of inappropriate behaviors, social initiations in nonverbal children, and a comparison of the effectiveness of Steps to Social Success (SSS) and Social Stories for Teaching Social Skills to children with autism.

Practitioners' usage of single-subject evaluation designs may be limited by requirements of collecting lengthy baseline phases, postponing treatment, withdrawing treatment, or administering treatment across multiple baselines. This presentation reviews relatively practical designs for practitioners that omit these requirements, including the Pretest-Posttest and the Periodic Treatments, the BC and BCD, the aggregated AB and the aggregated randomized AB, the short reversal, the short multiple baseline, and the short alternating treatments. Strengths and weakness of these designs, plus ways of combining practical designs with design components to obtain more definitive findings are discussed.

This is the third symposium in the continuing series of presentations outlining the contributions of research in behavioral pharmacology to the experimental analysis of behavior. Although the contributions of EAB to BPH are easily identified, the advancements made in the other direction are not as readily apparent. This symposium will highlight significant contributions of BPH to EAB.

Practitioners interested in conduting a pre-intervention functional assessment are faced with the daunting challenge of identifying a method that will be useful in a given setting and with a given population. The difficulty they are faced with has only increased in recent years as the number of functional assessment methods available in journals and on the world wide web has exploded. In this symposium we explore questions related to reliability, validity, and treatment utility of indirect and direct methods of functional assessment.

This symposium will present four papers describing various refinements in observation and measurement procedures in the field of applied behavior analysis. The first paper, presented by Jeffrey Luke, will present data comparing whole-session means and latency to first response as methods for identifying the function(s) of severe problem behavior. The second paper, delivered by Maeve Meanny, will discuss data comparing partial-interval recording (PIR) and momentary-time sampling (MTS) methods for estimating duration and frequency. She will also present data evaluating how PIR and MTS methods may affect treatment interpretation. The third paper, delivered by Frank Symons, will review the strengths and weaknesses of recent developments in sequential analysis, focusing on issues relevant to contingency analysis in natural environments. Finally, the last paper, presented by Luanne Witherup, will discuss the utility of obtaining behavioral measures of running away for children in foster care.

Panelists will discuss their experiences in the field and invite questions from attendees.

This series of presentations will explore a number of variables that influence the extent to which behavior is allocated toward compliance with academic tasks and other adult requests rather than less desirable responses (e.g., noncompliance, stereotypy). Collectively, these studies explore the effects of praise, instructions, three-step prompting, differential reinforcement, shaping, and non-contingent reinforcement. These variables were evaluated under both analog experimental conditions and under in more naturalistic settings (e.g., the preschool classroom.). The utility of and limitations associated with each of these strategies will be discussed, and researchers will provide recommendations for practice.

Many children with autism display deficits in the use of spontaneous language and cooperative play. Research recently conducted at Utah State University to address these challenges will be presented in this symposium. Topics will include the use of social scripting and script fading procedures, cooperative activity schedules, and strategies to teach manding for information by contriving motivating operations.

Direct Instruction (DI) has been proven to be a very effective instructional program. This symposium will describe extensions of DI to learners with varying characteristics. DI has been used with learners with developmental disabilities, emotional disturbance, and autism. The three presenters will discuss modifications of DI for each of these populations, with sample data showing the continued effectiveness of the DI protocols.

One of the defining characteristics of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders is a qualitative impairment in communication. The deficits in communication seen in children range from mutism, impaired use of nonverbal communication, limited ability to initiate or sustain conversational exchanges. These deficits present challenges to parents and educators and they clearly impact upon the social/emotional development of children on the spectrum. The papers included in this symposium will present behavioral interventions that have been developed for the purpose of overcoming problems often encountered when trying to teach language to children on the spectrum.

The purpose of this presentation is to describe the role of behavior analysts in preparing educators to work with children with and without disabilities. Although much of the work of applied behavior analysts deals with the school age population, as a field we are often absent from debates about school reform and teacher education. During this presentation we will make the case forwhy it is important to increase our presence in these forums and suggest strategies to talk about behavior principles in a manner that is acceptable to our colleagues in public schools and colleges of education.

Behavioral and traditional approaches to treating children with autism are very different in terms of philosophies, goals, curriculums, and specific teaching methods. Each of the presenters will provide a brief overview of these differences and discuss a study that they are implementing together in order to compare the effectiveness of the two approaches. The participants in this study are children ages 2-5 years that have a diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The children were videotaped in a standard situation with the same teacher and typically developing peer. Once the children had been video taped in the three situations, trained observers used the Autism Behavioral Observation System (ABOS) to measure the percentage of intervals in which specific target behaviors occurred. Inter-observer reliability and validity were measured for the ABOS. As the children were being video taped, their parents were interviewed in order to obtain detailed diagnostic information, as well as to determine which type of treatment approach had been chosen by the parents. Nine months later, parents will be interviewed again and the children will be videotaped in the same standard situations. Comparisons will be made between the children who are matched according to age, gender and initial level of autism to ascertain their progress in various areas of development. The researchers also investigated family characteristics that effected parents selection of a behavioral vs. traditional approaches to treatment of their children with autism. Finally, there are examples of using ABA approaches for children with ASD within the public school regular classes.

Behavior excesses and deficits have been identified as causal or contributing factors for a the leading causes of death, injury and disability. This symposium illustrates the role of behavior analysis interventions in altering risky behavior (i.e., dangerous behavior on school playgrounds), in promoting protective behavior (i.e., wearing bicycle safety helmets), and understanding factors that contribute to injurious behavior (i.e., the influence of violent video games on aggressive behavior).

Correspondence training, also referred to as "say-do" instruction can be used for: improving academic performances, behavioral support, and teaching motor skills. The purpose of this symposium is to demonstrate how correspondence training was used in the classroom and community. Implications for educators will be discussed.

In recent years, researchers have employed strategies associated with positive behavior support to develop interventions that focus on the reduction of challenging behavior. PBS and the process of functional behavioral assessment offer an empirically sound approach to intervening with the problem behaviors of children and adults with disabilities (Lucyshyn et al., 2002). Although there is great confidence from researchers in the importance of this approach for children, very little research has been conducted with children younger than three years. Three case studies will be presented that demonstrate the completion of an FBA and comprehensive PBS support plan. Following assessment, hypotheses were formulated and support plan strategies developed. The components generated included changes to parent interactions, child participation, and environmental modifications. All components were implemented by each childs mother, and were effective in reducing challenging behavior and increasing child engagement during typical home routines. A multiple baseline design was utilized for each study and illustrates changes in behavior. These investigations broaden the scope and utility of conducting functional assessment and provides evidence of the expanded impact of behavior analytic principles with a population not widely represented.

Early behavioral intervention has often demonstrated the ability to instill or increase basic social and interpersonal skills in children with autism. However, there remain many more advanced skill areas where programming is less evolved. This symposium presents data based procedures for ameliorating deficits in stranger safety, assertiveness and joint attention skills. These skill areas are often more challenging to develop than basic language, academic, and self-help behaviors. As behavioral interventions become more widespread and effective, increased numbers of children need assistance with the more subtle social skills. The first presentation reports on a program designed to improve childrens ability to protect themselves in high risk situations in the community. Child abduction is a real threat in todays world, and previous research has shown that children with autism are vulnerable. The second presentation describes an intervention to help children protect themselves from less severe mistreatment by peers in their environment. Being assertive is a positive social skill, and may also reduce resorting to aggressive behavior for self protection. The third presentation tells about a behavioral intervention to increase joint attention in children with autism, thus allowing the shared awareness and experience that makes social interaction so rewarding.

This symposium will provide four presentations that consist of unique applications of concurrent schedules of reinforcement to the treatment of problem behavior. Two of the presentations focus on prevention of problem behavior, while the other two focus on teaching alternative behaviors (mands) and biasing responding in favor of them. The first presentation evaluates the effects of preferred and nonpreferred toys during demand conditions. Results showed that the participants consistently allocated their time to demanding tasks and displayed little problem behavior when preferred toys were present. The second presentation provides a summary of a 4-experiment study in which the authors identified alternative stimulation that was substitutable for problem behavior maintained by automatic reinforcement. Providing alternative stimulation reduced problem behavior when both were concurrently available. The third presentation demonstrates how different qualities and durations of reinforcement can be manipulated to bias choice responding in favor of work requests, as compared to break requests and problem behavior, within functional communication training packages. The final presentation demonstrates that a resurgence of problem behavior may occur during FCT when newly taught alternative behaviors are placed on extinction or lean schedules of intermittent reinforcement; thus, these alternative behaviors may no longer compete effectively with problem behavior.

Over the past two decades, connectionist models of learning have provided impressive demonstrations of how much information is present in the environment. These results have been surprising to some, particularly in the domain of language, where it has been claimed that the input available to children is often insufficient to account for childrens eventual knowledge (the so-called Poverty of the Stimulus problem).In fact, considerably controversy remains regarding the extent to which experience provides a sufficient basis for language acquisition and linguistic generalization. Important questions have yet to be answered. Are there limits to statistically-based learning, and if so, what are they? Do language users literally record their experience in some numerical form? Recent empirical studies have established that the input available to young children is in fact massive, but it also occupies a very limited range of the total linguistic possibilities. How do we explain cases where generalization appears to go beyond experience if it is limited in this way?These questions will be the focus of my talk. I shall describe several examples of simulations in which generalization appears to go beyond the input. The analysis of how generalization occurs in these cases suggests that the processes of learning and generalization in child language acquisition may be richer than initially supposed.

Recent advances in the merger between behavioral economics and behavioral pharmacology are highlighted. Behavioral economics provides a way to quantify demand for a drug in terms of elasticity, or the rate at which consumption of a drug decreases with increases in its price. The first two presentations investigate drug elasticity using rhesus monkey self-administration assays. The effects of speed of drug infusion, reinforcer delay, and probability of reinforcement on drug demand are examined. The third presentation employs a human drug self-administration procedure and investigates consumption and drug choice with methadone-maintained patients. In this study, drugs are identified as independent, substitutable, or complementary commodities, and quantitative models are used to describe these drug interactions.

Behavioral development involves constant changes in individuals embedded in complex systems. Dynamic systems theory has been applied to many scientific fields, including behavior analysis and developmental psychology, but to a large extent there has been a total separation of these two fields. This symposium will begin by describing how dynamic systems or chaos theory can be useful in behavior analysis. Then, connecting complexity theory with behavior analysis it will then provide a basis for relating behavior analysis. Finally, a behavioral systems approach will be applied to real-world problems of children.

The best case scenario for most behavior analysts would be the successful promotion and exportation of our values and technology with no sacrifice of our science. One approach to be discussed focuses on marketing the benefits of our technology without attempting to market our world view simultaneously. Evidence for the quality of our products and services is found in the direct measures of behavior that are the foundation of our science. Consumers frequently recognize the value of this and wonder why it is absent in other services they receive. One of our basic values is thus transmitted. Behavioral educational methods which rely on direct measurement strategies have been amongst the most important technological contributions of our field. We will present a set of rights and responsibilities related to education developed by an ABA Task Force to illustrate the values that underlie promoting and delivering these technologies. Key to our success and to the integrity of our values, goals and outcomes is the correspondence between what we say we should do and what we actually do. Finally the panelists will make specific recommendations which include 1) examining other models, such as Positive Behavioral Supports, that have a track record of exportation and promotion 2) strongly supporting behavior analytical entrepreneurial efforts 3) value highly the study and achievement of maintenance and generalization effects 4) recognize that much of the elegant research published in JABA is the experimental rather than applied analysis of human behavior; and 5) reinforce and promote widespread dissemination of our technology and values by creating and supporting two new publications.

Three papers on assessment in OBM will be presented.

The TeachTown program is based on best-practices from ABA, education, and developmental psychology. The software includes a comprehensive curriculum for children with autism and teaches receptive language, social understanding, self-help, attention, memory, auditory processing, and early academic skills. The software also includes a complete data tracking system which provides the adult with information about the childs progress including prompts, errors, correct responses, etc. In addition, the software includes an innovative communication system where adults can send messages or write session notes. Multiple facilitators can access the program from various locations so that the child can play anywhere without losing any data. The software program also includes a large library of non-computer supplementary activities (based on PRT and other naturalistic programs) which can be printed out and used by any adult (i.e. does not require a trained therapist). A demonstration of the software along with results from 3 research studies will be presented. The potential for using TeachTown and other computer-assisted programs will be discussed.

Three participants demonstrated two independent groups of three seven-member equivalence classes, one with and one without a speed contingency. Each participant then experienced transfer training using a class member with trigrams. During transfer training, the three A-stimuli from the speed classes served as sample for the consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams. Transfer test involved all the remaining non-speed class members. Test results showed increases in the response speeds of the non-speed class members suggesting that speed transfer may be an artifact of the procedure rather than the specific stimuli involved in transfer training.