Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavior analysts continuously seek to identify efficient and effective procedures to teach novel skills to fluency. Fluency can be measured in terms of celeration, or change in frequency across time, or behavioral agility as measured on the standard celeration chart (SCC). Behavioral agility has been measured as the change in celerations across the acquisition of skills, which can include steeper slopes, rising bottoms, and fewer timings to reach aims (goals). The first study evaluated the effects of differential consequences on the fluency and celeration of learning the endangered Hawaiian language within the stimulus equivalence framework. The second study evaluated the effects of self-management procedures, specifically self-charting, on measures of self-control in addition to changes in celerations, bottom frequencies, and the number of timings to fluency for a series of skill slices. Participants from both studies were typically developing. Outcomes will be discussed in terms of applicability within and across populations, skillsets, settings, and areas for future research.

The purpose of the current investigation was to explore whether self-charting or teacher-charting would produced steeper celerations, rising bottom frequencies, and/or fewer timings to fluency (i.e., behavioral agility) for typically-developing children between the ages of 4 and 6. In addition, the purpose of this study was to identify if there was a relationship between measures of behavioral agility and measures of self-control during delay probes in which participants waited to consume highly preferred edibles. Participants were separated into three groups: experimental self-charting, control teacher-charting only, and control temporal delay probes only. Results did not provide evidence that self-charting was more beneficial than teacher-charting in producing indicators of behavioral agility. In addition, the data did not show a clear relationship between measures of self-control and charting. However, all participants who received instruction became fluent in multiple slices of instruction across multiple programs. In addition, five out of seven participants across experimental and control groups improved their performance on waiting for a large portion of a highly preferred edible when having free access to the item. Findings should be considered with caution due to the small sample size, and future research should continue to explore ways to increase the rate of student learning and possible avenues to measure correlations between self-control and self-management.