Association for Behavior Analysis International

With the enactment of Decree 5.707/2006, the Brazilian public manager has to understand what competences are needed for the public servants to do their jobs, improving the quality of public service. According to this decree, each competency should be described as a publically observable, operationally defined behavior. This paper outlines the results of the description and evaluation of the behavioral patterns in six public agencies, three federal and three state-run institutions. A total of 1,550 public employees were analyzed . A total of 150 references of performance were described, of which 13 were common to at least five of the six institutions. Each performance was evaluated by the public servant and his or her manager in a scale between 1 and 5. The performances of Document Processing and Organization and Document Filing were evaluated and showed a high degree of expertise by servers and managers. However, behaviors involving Organizacional Planning have been assessed as having the lowest degree of expertise. The result of this behavioral assessment was used as the basis for the planning of employee selection, training and performance evaluation in these institutions. The main challenge these institutions face when trying to be in accordance with the decree is to have public servants able to describe behavioral patterns. Our lab has been repeatedly called on by the Brazilian government to train students and public employees for that task.

This paper discusses managing interlocking behavioral contingencies and metacontingencies in order to improve retention and on-time graduation at a large, public, research university in Miami (Florida International University; enrollment: 54,000, seventh largest in the U.S.; 87% underrepresented student populations). We focus on the award winning Graduation Success Initiative (GSI), a comprehensive, university-wide set of short-term and long-term systemic interventions that transform the administration and advising of the undergraduate curriculum and that have produced a 9% increase in graduation rates in two years. The GSI's systemic interventions are complex and extensive, and we are presenting a series of papers that document and analyze the interventions' effects. In this paper, we concentrate on systems of reinforcing contingencies, metacontingencies, and rules that shape the behavior of individual undergraduate students.