All right, welcome back to ABA Exam Review and the continuation of our sixth edition BCBA task list series. Today we're continuing concepts and principles with B15, identify examples of response maintenance. Like many of our task list items, especially early, it's just a term that you're likely already familiar with and that we're just going to expand upon. We are not going to make this difficult. We're going to boil it down to what we think is essential to help you pass your exam and to become a better practitioner. At the essence, response maintenance just means once we stop teaching a skill, that skill continues. As always, like and subscribe if you haven't already. Check out behavior analyststudy.com for all our study materials. When you pass your exam, let us know so we can include you in the Sunday shout out. Work hard, study hard. Let's get going. So response maintenance refers to the continued performance of a learned behavior over time after the intervention or teaching procedures have been reduced or removed. In other words, we teach something, we remove teaching and the behavior continues. Simple as that. If we were to graph this and we made this our baseline and then we move to intervention and say it increased and then we move to maintenance no intervention anymore we would hope the behavior continued or maintained now response maintenance is associated with generality one of the dimensions of ABA so if we talk about maintenance and generalization being very closely linked that's why both have this idea of behavior persisting over time and across settings, people and stimuli. Maintenance indicates behavior change is meaningful and durable. If our behavior change is not durable, then it's likely that whatever skill we've taught, whatever change we've made is going to go away if we aren't constantly teaching it. And since we can't constantly teach the same skills and we have to move on, that would be a problem. It's why maintenance is so important. So response maintenance occurs when a previously learned behavior continues to occur after intervention has been has ended or been faded. Repeating what we just said in a different way. That's what you need to do. However you're going to remember it, that's how you need to say it. Now maintenance demonstrates lasting behavior change over time. It's very important for us to be effective that behavior change persists over time. Think about basic skills we do like basic math, spelling, speaking, driving, all these things that we're doing day in and day out that are persistent throughout our lives. Now think about something you learned maybe 10 years ago. Let's say you took calculus 10 years ago and you haven't done calculus in 10 years. The chance of that maintaining is very small. So that's an extreme example, but the populations that we often work with, basic skills or what we consider basic skills are often challenging for them to maintain. Maintenance indicates behavior has become part of the repertoire. A repertoire is just a set of responses. These can be skills or these can be trouble behaviors. Think about a basketball player, a professional basketball player. Their repertoire of skills is large. A lot of different dribbling skills, shooting skills, passing skills, right? So, we want to always be expanding our clients repertoire of skills. But if they're not maintaining, we can't teach new skills. We can't expand that repertoire. How do we teach it? Just like we generalize, by natural reinforcement or environmental cues. And we always plan and prepare for maintenance. And that's a key idea over and over again. We never wait and hope things happen. We're always planning. We're always preparing. Very easy example here. A child is taught to independently tie their shoes during ABA. Once the teaching program is mastered or done, the child continues to tie their shoes correctly without prompts or reinforcement. We're no longer teaching it. We don't have to reinforce them. They can just do the skill that we've taught. It's maintained. Teaching for maintenance ensures behaviors are again durable and usable beyond the instructional setting. Maintenance is assessed by measuring behavior after delays in teaching or reinforcement. If you've ever run a maintenance trial, this is the idea. We master a skill. 3 weeks later, we go back to the skill. I master the color red. Three weeks later, I ask my client, "Can you name this color?" Hopefully, they say red. That's how we're going to assess maintenance. Common strategies for promoting and teaching intermittent reinforcement, thinning reinforcement, naturally occurring contingencies, nothing we haven't talked about, nothing that we shouldn't be doing on the daily on a daily basis anyway. And skills that maintain are more likely to be generalized and functionally useful. And if our skills aren't useful, then what's the point, right? If we can maintain these across settings, across people, they're much more useful dayto-day. So key takeaway is response maintenance is continued behavior. After formal teaching ends, we teach teach stop teaching a month later. We hope that skill continues. Essential for ensuring longlasting and meaningful behavior change. That's what we're going for. Durable, long-lasting, meaningful change. Maintenance should be planned for from the beginning of instruction. Right? We're not hoping and waiting maintenance happens. Got to have a plan from the beginning. Thanks for watching. Not too complicated, pretty straightforward. As usual, we're going to continue on our sixth edition BCBA task list. So, look out for that video. Make sure you subscribe for all of our videos. Check out behavioranaliststudy.com for all of our study materials. When you do pass, let us know so we can include you in the Sunday shoutout. Work hard. Study hard. OSN.