Association for Behavior Analysis International

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.

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.

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.

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.