Educational Strategies for Mild Disabilities

Self-Administered Written Prompts

• Written task analyses serve as effective self-administered prompts for individuals with mild disabilities.
• General feedback, combined with these prompts, enhances performance in functional community living tasks post-training.

Personalized System of Instruction (PSI)

• PSI allows learners to progress at their own pace and master material before advancing.
• Instructors provide repeated testing and support to aid learning.
• Research demonstrated PSI's efficacy in teaching banking skills to adults with mild disabilities.

Ecological Inventory for Skill Assessment

• Conducting an ecological inventory identifies essential skills for community functioning.
• Direct observations and interviews with significant individuals help assess community demands.

Assessment of Community Living Skills

• Following the ecological inventory, learners' skill sets are evaluated to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
• Assessment approaches may include broad-based evaluations or targeted evaluations of high-priority skills.

Instructional Goals and Sequencing

• Instructional goals should prioritize skills that enhance independence and options for learners.
• Research compared cumulative and interspersal task sequencing methods for teaching money management tasks, indicating both methods lead to significant learning gains.

Teaching Complex Discriminations

• Individuals with disabilities often face discrimination, necessitating the teaching of complex social skills for real-world interactions.
• Research is required to effectively teach interpersonal problem-solving skills that generalize across diverse situations.

Stimulus Equivalence Methodology

• Stimulus equivalence proposes forming complex equivalence classes to improve community living skills.
• Past research primarily focused on basic academic tasks; it is crucial to extend this methodology to community skills, including monetary management and social competence.

Training and Implementation of Functional Analyses (FAs)

• Training for staff to conduct Functional Analyses (FAs) can be effective even for those without behavior-analytic experience.
• Various professionals, including educators and caregivers, can be trained to implement FAs, minimizing barriers to practice.
• An assessment tool for evaluating the risks associated with FAs was developed following a survey of Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs).

Survey and Tool Development

• The survey aimed to assess the need for a risk assessment tool among BCBAs.
• A beta version of the risk assessment tool was created, providing strategies for risk mitigation and references for implementing safety measures.
• Ten experienced BCBA-Ds reviewed the tool for feedback, leading to its refinement.

Participant Demographics and Responses

• Survey participants included a wide age range and varied years of experience, from those with under five years to over twenty-five years in the field.
• High percentage of participants had experience analyzing data and implementing treatment based on FA results, indicating a solid exposure to the process.
• Most participants expressed uncertainty about the appropriateness of conducting FAs and agreed on the need for a risk assessment tool.

Perspectives on Functional Analyses

• Strong consensus (96.2%) indicated FAs guide future treatment effectively when other methods fail.
• A significant percentage (94.7%) believed there is a need for a tool assessing risk and providing safety guidelines.
• 90.8% disagreed with the idea that FAs are only applicable for individuals with developmental disabilities, showing broader applicability.

Risk Assessment Insights

• A large majority recognized a lack of structured tools to evaluate risks prior to conducting FAs.
• Opinions were divided on whether FAs are inherently risky, highlighting diverse attitudes toward risk management in practice.
• There was agreement on the necessity for clinical decision tools to better guide the use of FAs as the field continues to grow.

Tool Adjustments and Feedback

• The tool underwent modifications based on expert feedback, ensuring it addressed concerns regarding risk evaluation.
• Changes included incorporating various risk factor combinations into an interactive tool, allowing for more nuanced risk assessments.
• The tool aligns with the BACB® Professional and Ethical Compliance Code, emphasizing the importance of risk-benefit analysis in therapeutic procedures.

Summary

• The development of a risk assessment tool aims to enhance the safety and effectiveness of FAs in practice, responding to the clear demand from BCBAs for resources enabling informed decision-making.
• The integration of expert feedback ensures the tool meets the needs of practitioners in managing risk while conducting FAs.

Importance of Flexibility in Design

• Research designs should be tailored to individual experiments to effectively address unique research questions.
• Good experimental design relies on manipulating independent variables to produce meaningful data.

Experimental Designs

• A variety of analytic tactics can be combined in research designs, leading to numerous unique experimental setups.
• Effective designs utilize ongoing evaluation of individual data based on baseline logic, involving prediction, verification, and replication.

Internal Validity

• High internal validity indicates a clear functional relationship in experiments.
• Experimental control involves managing all relevant variables and demonstrating steady state responding.
• Confounding variables pose a significant threat to internal validity.

Subject Confounds

• Maturation involves changes in the subjects during the experiment that could affect results.
• Repeated measurements help control and identify uncontrolled variables.

Treatment Integrity

• Treatment integrity reflects how accurately the independent variable is implemented.
• Low treatment integrity complicates the interpretation of results, with "treatment drift" indicating inconsistencies in application over time.

Precise Operational Definition

• High treatment integrity requires a clear, detailed operational definition of treatment procedures encompassing four dimensions: verbal, physical, spatial, and temporal.

Verbal Dimension

• Concerns the content, manner, and context of verbal behavior.
• Example: Loudly expressing dissent during a situation.

Physical Dimension

• Focuses on observable physical actions involved in the behavior, which must be measurable.
• Example: Hitting or flapping hands in a noticeable manner.

Spatial Dimension

• Pertains to the location and position during behavior, ensuring context is included.
• Example: Disruptively running across a classroom.

Temporal Dimension

• Involves the timing, duration, and frequency of the behavior.
• Example: Tantrums lasting over 30 seconds occurring shortly after receiving a transition request.

Simplify, Standardize, and Automate

• Simplicity in treatment delivery enhances consistency and social validation.
• Standardizing as many aspects as possible increases ease of implementation.
• Automated devices can be utilized for delivering independent variables without compromising integrity.

Training and Practice

• Individuals conducting experiments should receive adequate training and practice.
• Effective training may include detailed scripts, verbal instructions, modeling, and feedback.

Assessing Treatment Integrity

• Tracking treatment integrity helps ensure actual implementation matches planned methods.
• Continuous observation and calibration enable retraining to maintain high levels of integrity, aiming to minimize confounding variables.

Social Validity

• Evaluates the behavioral significance of the target behavior and the appropriateness of procedures and results.
• Typically assessed through direct and indirect consumer feedback, focusing on satisfaction rates.

Social Importance of Behavior Change Goals

• Valid goals are determined by assessing the performance of competent individuals and manipulating performance levels for optimal outcomes.

Social Importance of Interventions

• Collect consumer opinions on intervention acceptability through rating scales and questionnaires.
• Tools include the Intervention Rating Profile and the Treatment Acceptability Rating Form.

Social Importance of Behavior Changes

• Outcomes are assessed by comparing subject performance against normative samples, using standardized assessments, obtaining consumer evaluations, and expert reviews.
• Testing performance in natural environments offers insight into generalization and application.

Normative Sample

• Ongoing behavior probes allow for continuous comparison with a normative sample, measuring both improvement and areas needing attention.

Reinforcement

• Reinforcement does not increase behavior in all conditions.
• Reinforcement depends on motivation.

Four-term Contingency

• Motivating operations (MOs) must be considered when discussing the three-term contingency.

Reinforcement Basics

• Reinforcement must be immediate.
• Awareness is not necessary for reinforcement to increase behavior.
• Automatic reinforcement occurs independently of another person.
• The response itself produces the reinforcement.

Classes of Reinforcement

• Origin:
  • Unconditioned reinforcement: examples include food and water.
  • Generalized/Conditioned reinforcement: a conditioned reinforcer paired with multiple conditioned and unconditioned reinforcers, such as money, tokens, or points.
• Properties:
  • Edible reinforcers: food.
  • Sensory reinforcers: massages or tickles.
  • Tangible reinforcers: trinkets or toys.
  • Activity reinforcers: playing a game or recess.
  • Social reinforcers: physical proximity or social interaction.

Categories of Stimulus Preference Assessments

• Asking about stimulus preferences.
• Observing the target person under free-operant conditions.
• Presenting various stimuli in a series of trial-based observations.

Behavior Chain

• A specific sequence of discrete responses.
• Each response is associated with a particular stimulus condition.
• When linked together, they create a chain that produces a terminal outcome.

Components in a Chain Serve Dual Functions

• Each response in the chain serves as a conditioned reinforcer for the responses that produced it.
• Each response in the chain serves as a discriminative stimulus (SD) for the next response.

Behavior Chains and Limited Hold

• Emphasizes both accuracy and proficiency.
• A sequence of behaviors must be performed correctly within a specified time to produce reinforcement.

Constructing a Task Analysis

• The sequence one individual may use to perform a skill may not be the same as another individual.
• It must be individualized based on age, skill level, disability, and prior experience.
• Task analyses may involve a limited number of steps, but these may be broken down into subtasks.

Methods for Constructing a Task Analysis

• Observe a competent individual perform the task.
• Consult with experts or persons skilled in performing the task.
• Perform the task yourself.

Assessing Mastery Levels

• Single-opportunity method (assessment stops when a step is performed incorrectly, remaining steps are scored with a -).
• Total-task chaining:
  • Use if the learner knows many of the tasks but needs to learn how to perform them in sequence.
  • Use if the learner has an imitative repertoire.
  • Use if the learner has moderate to severe disabilities.
  • Use if the task is not long or complex.

Behavior Chain Interruption Strategy (BCIS)

• The chain is interrupted at a predetermined step.
• This allows for the emission of another behavior.
• This interruption might cause some distress.
• This can cause motivation for learning the new behavior within the chain.

Factors Affecting Performance

• Schedule of reinforcement:
  • Must use an appropriate schedule (refer to chapter 13).
  • Consider the number of responses in the chain when determining the schedule.
• Extinction:
  • Responses performed further from the reinforcer may become less likely.
  • This interrupts the SD relation and can result in withering performance of the chain.
• Stimulus variation:
  • Introduce all variations of the stimulus items to be encountered later.
  • This increases generalization of the chain.
• Response variation:
  • Varied responses may be needed to deal with stimulus variation.
  • This may require additional retraining of responses.

Mark L. Sundberg

• Dr. Sundberg received his doctorate degree in Applied Behaviour Analysis from Western Michigan University in 1980.
• He is the author of the Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP).
• He is a co-author of the original ABLLS and the book "Teaching Language to Children with Autism or Other Developmental Disabilities".
• He has published over 50 professional papers and 4 book chapters.
• He is the founder and past editor of the journal "The Analysis of Verbal Behavior".
• He is a twice past-president of The Northern California Association for Behavior Analysis.
• He is a past-chair of the Publication Board of ABAI.
• He has served on the Board of Directors of the B.F. Skinner Foundation.
• He has given hundreds of conference presentations and workshops nationally and internationally.
• He has taught 80 college and university courses on behavior analysis, verbal behavior, sign language, and child development.
• He is a licensed psychologist with over 40 years of clinical experience.
• He consults for public and private schools that serve children with autism.
• He was awarded the "Distinguished Psychology Department Alumnus Award" from Western Michigan University in 2001.
• He was awarded the "Jack Michael Outstanding Contributions in Verbal Behavior Award" from ABAI's Verbal Behavior Special Interest Group in 2013.

What is School Psychology?

• School psychologists are professionals trained in both psychology and education.
• They use their expertise to provide a wide range of services to students, their families, and educators.

The Role of Behavior Analysis in School Psychology

• Behavior analysis has significantly influenced school psychology by providing a framework for understanding, assessing, and changing behavior.
• This approach emphasizes the importance of identifying the environmental factors that influence behavior and using those insights to develop effective interventions.

Key Differences Between Behavioral and Traditional Models of School Psychology

• The traditional model relies on psychometric assessments, which focus on categorizing students based on standardized tests.
• The behavioral model embraces a more holistic approach. Behavioral school psychologists utilize consultation, assessment, intervention, research, supervision, and evaluation to address students' needs.

Consultation in School Psychology

• Consultation is a core service provided by school psychologists.
• It involves collaborating with teachers, parents, and other professionals to address student challenges, such as academic difficulties or behavior problems.
• This collaboration is rooted in behavioral principles and aims to improve the student's environment.

Assessment in School Psychology

• Traditional assessment relies on standardized tests to categorize students based on their performance compared to a normative group.
• Behavioral assessment focuses on identifying the specific factors that influence a student's behavior.
• This approach often involves analyzing the student's environment, including classroom settings, home life, and peer interactions.

Intervention in School Psychology

• Behavioral school psychologists design and implement interventions tailored to address specific student needs.
• Interventions involve modifying the environment to change behavior in a positive direction.
• This can involve strategies for improving academic performance or resolving behavioral difficulties.

Direct vs. Indirect Interventions

• Direct interventions involve the school psychologist working directly with the student to modify their behavior.
• Indirect interventions are implemented by others, such as teachers or parents, who have been trained by the school psychologist.

The Importance of Supervision in School Psychology

• School psychology students and practitioners are required to receive supervision from experienced professionals.
• This ensures that interventions are provided ethically, effectively, and in accordance with professional standards.

The Scientist-Practitioner Model

• This model emphasizes the integration of research and practice in school psychology.
• School psychologists are encouraged to stay updated with research findings and apply those findings to their practice.

Program Planning and Evaluation

• School psychologists play a critical role in planning and evaluating educational programs.
• They help to design and implement programs that meet the needs of students, and they monitor the effectiveness of those programs.

Key Areas for Future Research in School Psychology

• More research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of functional assessment as a tool for selecting interventions.
• Further investigation is essential to ensure the integrity of intervention implementation.
• Continued research on the use of functional assessment as an effective intervention selection process is critical.

What is a School Psychologist

• School psychologists bring a psychological perspective to the problems of educators and their clients
• They have broad-based training in both education and psychology
• School psychologists are practitioners with specialty training in psychology and education that provide comprehensive psychoeducational services to clients

The Primary Purpose of the Text

• The text explores how behavior analysis contributes to the general services that school psychologists provide
  • Consultation
  • Assessment
  • Intervention
  • Supervision
  • Research
  • Program Evaluation

Behavior Analysis has Influenced School Psychology

• The field can be conceptualized as a system of service provision designed to help remediate school-based problems of children
• The system should be preventative and incorporate explicit efforts to resolve problems

Behavioral Versus Traditional Model of School Psychology

• The behavioral model of school psychology differs fundamentally from the traditional model (psychometric model)
• The psychometric model views the school psychologist's primary function to be that of a diagnostician
• Behavioral school psychologists are much more than diagnosticians
  • They are involved in consultation, assessment, intervention, research, supervision, and evaluation
• Training in and a commitment to behavior analysis strongly affects their activities in each of these areas

Consultation

• Consultation is a fundamental form of interaction between a professional and an individual who wants to help a third party or a system change
• An example of this would be a teacher seeking consultation with a school psychologist to address a specific student's learning needs or a general classroom management problem
• It is the bread and butter of practice for many behaviorally oriented school psychologists
• Child-focused psychological consultation may have emerged as early as the 1880s in Lightner Witmer's child psychology clinic at the University of Pennsylvania
• Consultation was widely practiced by physicians and mental health workers in the 1920s
• It did not gain widespread attention until Caplan formalized it as a form of mental health service delivery in 1970
• Bergan developed the formalized consultation process grounded in behavioral theory and principles in 1970 and 1977
• Kratochwill and Bergan refined the model in 1990

Psychological and Psychoeducational Assessment

• School psychologists spend most of their time categorizing students, especially for special education and placement purposes
• They frequently use standardized measures of children's aptitudes and achievement
• These tests characterize students based on their performance relative to some normative group
• Behavioral assessment involves identifying meaningful response units and their controlling variables for the purpose of understanding and altering behavior
• It involves selecting target behaviors, devising an intervention, and evaluating the outcome of that intervention

Intervention

• Interventions have become a major function of behavioral school psychologists
• An intervention is a planned modification of the environment made for the purpose of altering the environment in a prespecified way
• They are carefully chosen and completely described
• They focus on environmental modifications rather than focusing narrowly on child-related variables
• They are goal-directed, seeking to modify behavior in a prespecified way
• Direct interventions involve the school psychologist interacting directly with the person whose behavior is targeted for change
• Indirect interventions are developed by a school psychologist and a consultee (e.g., a teacher) to benefit a client (e.g., a child)
• Indirect interventions are carried out by the consultee or another interested party rather than by the school psychologist
• School psychologists often help design interventions that are implemented by other people, such as teachers, aides, and parents
• School psychologists have hands-on involvement in intervention, which is limited to an initial demonstration of techniques
• School psychologists rely on techniques (e.g., functional assessment or curriculum-based assessment) that link assessment to intervention
• They provide a mechanism for evaluating the success of a strategy

Supervision

• School psychology students must be supervised
• School psychology trainees must receive highly structured and frequent guidance by a qualified school psychologist
• They must have supervised experience in both practica and internship settings
• Even after graduation, supervision continues, as practicing school psychologists receive both administrative and professional supervision
• Administrative Supervision refers to supervision regarding the specific interpretation and implementation of district policies and regulations to school psychologists in their capacity as employees
• Professional Supervision refers to specific interpretation and implementation of actions taken by school psychologists in their capacity as professional psychologists

Research in School Psychology

• The scientist-practitioner model proposes that effective psychologists are able to integrate research and practice in their area
• There are three hierarchical research roles that school psychologists might play:
  • Consumer
  • Distributor
  • Conductor
• School psychologists must read research and critically evaluate the research they read in order to “apply research to practice.”
• School psychologists must be prepared to function as a distributor of research and to provide guidance regarding appropriate methods of assessment and intervention
• School psychologists may actually conduct research
• Functional Assessment is a process through which functional relationships between environmental variables and desirable/undesirable student behavior are identified
• Curricular modifications can be made to decrease or eliminate problem behaviors
• This process has been demonstrated to yield favorable results with students with various disabilities, including emotional/behavioral disorders

Program Planning and Evaluation

• Program planning and evaluation is a leadership role that involves aiding in planning, developing, and monitoring educational services and programs
• It often includes projects like:
  • Establishing a comprehensive model of inclusion for preschool children with disabilities in a preschool center for typically developing children
  • Implementing a curriculum-based measurement system in an elementary school
  • Training school-based teams in functional assessment and the development of effective behavioral support plans

Translating Research into Practice

• Applied behavior analysis has accumulated a wealth of empirical knowledge that is quite useful to school psychologists
• These include how to utilize assessment strategies to match interventions to the needs of individual students, how to arrange educational environments to provide sufficient learning opportunities and contingencies, and how to monitor progress and evaluate outcomes
• Further research is needed to evaluate the utility of functional assessment for selecting interventions
• It is important to ensure that interventions are implemented with integrity
• There is a need to continue monitoring and evaluating the utility of functional assessment as an intervention selection process