hello I'm Sarah and I'm a board certified behavior analyst I make videos about applied Behavior Analysis or ABA and how it can be used to help children with autism I recently took some time away from making videos to focus on some other projects that I have going on and now I'm happy to be back today I want to talk about the RBT competency assessment particularly the initial competency assessment I want to save you RBT hopefuls the pain of showing up for your competency assessment only to get set home sad so I'm going to go down the RBT competency assessment item by item and tell you what I'm looking for when I do this assessment [Music] there might be some variations in how I do the RBT competency assessment compared to how other bcbas do it but if you're truly competent in these skills you'll pass it no matter who's doing the assessment don't forget to like this video And subscribe to my channel now let's get started the first section is on measurement and item one is on continuous measurement continuous measurement essentially means that we're measuring all of the behavior not just a sample the examples listed here are frequency duration latency and IRT and these are usually the ones that I ask about frequency is really simple it's just accounts of the behavior and the time in which we're measuring it isn't specified rate is the exact same as frequency except we're specifying the amount of time in which we're observing frequency is definitely the most common form of data collection that we do in ABA that I've observed at least duration is how long a behavior lasts and this works better for behaviors like crying or Tantrums latency is how long it takes for a behavior to start after an antecedent or trigger is introduced just think of the word late how late is the behavior following that antecedent stimulus or Trigger or SD say a therapist were to give the instruction clap your hands and then 10 seconds later I clap my hands the latency would be 10 seconds my response was 10 seconds after the SD IRT is inter response time think of the word inter meaning between response is the behavior so the time between responses we don't really use this a whole lot in applied settings at least not where I've worked but you should know this for the comp the assessment type for this item is demonstrating it with a client explaining what it is in an interview or role playing it with a bcba so be prepared for all three if they want you to demonstrate frequency count for example make sure they Define the behavior that you're supposed to be counting and give you a way to collect data on it so a tally counter paper and pen or whatever software they're using for data collection item number two is discontinuous measurement and it's different from continuous measurement and that we're not measuring the behavior precisely like we are with continuous measurement we're not capturing every single instance of the behavior there are also three different assessment types for this one so the bcba might ask you to explain it in an interview demonstrate it in a role play with the bcba or do it with a client this one always trips up everybody so make sure to go in extra prepared for this one because it's a little bit confusing so partial and whole interval recording in partial interval recording we're looking at so we have an interval say it's 10 seconds and you're looking to see if the behavior happened during any part of that interval say the behavior that we're tracking is clapping if there's a 10 second interval and I clap one time an entire interval you would count it as yes it happens if 10 seconds elapsed and I did not clap you would say no it didn't happen it's pretty straightforward so just think does the behavior happen at any part of that interval yes or no that's partial and over recording we typically use this for Behavior reduction purposes then there's whole interval which just think about what it says whole interval did the behavior happen for the whole time the example I usually use is in-seat behavior in a classroom setting if we're trying to increase the behavior of staying in your seat you want to establish an interval and measure if that behavior happened the whole time so if the interval is five minutes and kiddo sits in his chair for 4 minutes and 59 seconds and then gets up during the very last second it's a no you count that interval as the behavior did not happen the behavior has to happen the whole interval in order for it to count yes it happened and then there's momentary time sampling which I always say is great for classroom settings because you only have to observe during the very end of an interval say the interval is an hour long and the behavior that you're tracking is again in seat Behavior at the end of the hour when the timer goes off the teacher looks at the student if the student is in the chair then you would count yes the behavior is happening if at the end of the hour you look at the student and they're not sitting in the chair then it would count as a note so you're sampling the behavior at a very specific Moment In Time momentary time sampling item number three is data and graphs you can do this with a client in a role play or in an interview this can be challenging if you don't have any previous experience with data collection so again make sure that your bcba sets you up with success here ask for what their preferences are as far as data collection goes make sure they're explaining those data collection procedures that they typically use in that setting and then we would demonstrate it to them most agencies nowadays have software that automatically grafts data so you might not have to demonstrate that part but you at least have to be able to to explain the purpose of graphing so we graph our data to see the progress over time with a client the way I would typically do this is I would explain a program that I'm doing with the clients to the therapist that's being assessed and I would do something kind of simple like frequency of aggression I would briefly explain how the data collection system works the operational definition of the behavior that we're tracking so we know what counts and what doesn't and then I would hand that system off to the therapist to collect data for a maybe a minute or two now we're moving on to the second section of the assessment which is called assessment both of these items in the assessment section of the competency assessment have to be either with a client or role play so there's no interview option here you have to be able to demonstrate both of these skills first item here is preference assessment don't overthink this one I typically am not looking for a specific type of preference assessment here so single stimulus versus paired stimulus or free operand I'm not really looking for that I'm just looking for can you figure out what the client is motivated for can you figure out what the client likes and wants so if I said hey show me a preference assessment if you hold up two items to the client or to the bcba if you're doing a role play and say hey which one do you want I would say that's a great preference assessment some BCBS might want you to collect data on a preference assessment so I'd highly encourage you to watch my videos about preference assessment there's a part one and a part two if you want to be extra super duper prepared for this part of the assessment next you have collecting ABC data which is item number five I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty about ABC data I've gone over this in other videos I highly encourage you to watch those as well but the key things I want you to keep in mind here the objective don't talk about how the client might be feeling when you do your ABC data you're talking about what you're seeing what you're hearing be very detailed and make sure that you're breaking down your data in the correct categories so what happened right before the behavior goes under antecedent the behavior of the client only goes in the behavior section and when you're talking about consequences don't think about it like oh what punishment was imposed consequences don't necessarily even have to be social consequences it's literally just what happened in the environment around the client after a behavior happened again I go over all this some great detail in my other videos I can't remember off the top of my head what that video is called but I will put it in writing right here now on to the skill acquisition and behavior reductions section three of these tasks have to be demonstrated with a client so in the previous sections you had the option of doing all role player interview with this section you have to be able to show these skills with a client in Vivo because you're going to be working with clients one day you have to be comfortable with that I usually give the therapist the option of which ones they want to demonstrate with a client based on their comfort level but those might be predetermined by the bcba so go in ready to do any of these with a client the first item in this section is item number six discrete trial teaching a discrete trial is basically a learning trial that is discrete as in there's a very clear start to the trial the antecedent stimulus or SD typically this is an instruction of some kind like clap your hands next we have the target response which is whatever it is we're trying to teach the client to do this is the response that we're prompting then the consequence which is the end of the trial and that's reinforcement or error correction if the client committed error during the trial so for the clap your hands example the therapist says clap your hands the client claps their hands and then they get a reinforcer that's a very simple example just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about when people typically talk about discrete trial training or dtt they think about this happening in a more structured format with the learner and the therapist sitting at a table more than likely and running multiple trials in Rapid succession a lot of times bcbas will use token systems so that clients can get reinforcement on a continuous schedule without reinforcement time interrupting the learning process this one's really difficult for me to explain without showing you so I'd highly recommend that you Google discrete trial training just to see what it looks like and this one takes practice so don't try to go into your competency assessment without having practice this with an experienced practitioner before number eight is naturalistic teaching in parentheses on here we have incidental teaching this essentially means that you're taking advantage of naturally occurring learning opportunities as they pop up in your session if you're working on teaching the learner how to make requests and the learner demonstration into interest in the item that you're teaching them how to request take advantage of that learning opportunity I always tell my therapist try to create a learning opportunity out of every single situation and make it really fun even if there isn't a program in place to teach a new skill if you know that the client doesn't know something and you can find a fun way to teach it do it that's essentially what incidental teaching is so for example say I have a learner who has limited language skills and I find this pen lying around there's so much that we can talk about with this pen maybe we can talk about the length long versus short this thing is soft it's puffy it's round what do we do with it we write with it or say we have this scrunchie here and we're working on the intraverbal fill-in Ready set go so the therapist is ready set and the target responses for the client to say go to work on early conversation skills I could build this in with the scrunchies so I'd say Ready Set client would say go and then that's so much fun and you just taught it into verbal items eight and nine are chaining and shaping and the reason why I'm mentioning them both together is because people typically confuse them because both of them involve break taking things down into smaller steps let me explain the difference to you with chaining you're taking a behavior that is made up of several small steps and then teaching it step by step examples include hand washing and tooth brushing maybe putting on shoes making a bed taking a shower the first step in chaining is Task analysis analyzing the task bringing it down into those steps then you pick the chaining procedure you want to use so there's forward backward and total task forward means that you are fading out your prompts your teaching starting with the first step in the chain so if a client needs prompting to do every single step of brushing their teeth start fading out your prompts and teaching Independence for the first step in the chain which would be to turn the water on and then you're prompting that learner through every single other step in the chain once the learner Masters that first step then you start fading out prompts for the second step in the chain which is to wet the toothbrush once the client Masters that you move on to the third step in the chain and so on and so forth until they've mastered the entire chain the backward chain is the opposite you're doing essentially the same thing except you're fading out prompts for the last step and chain first so I'm prompting you through turning the water around letting your toothbrush brushing your teeth blah blah until we get to the last step which is turning the water off that's the first step I'm going to fade out my prompts for so I prompt my learner through all the steps in the chain and then once I get to that last step that's when I start fading out my prompts once the learner can do that independently then I go back one step in the chain I prompt the learner through every single step in the chain except the last two in which I start fading out prompts for those and then you work back and back and back until you've taught the entire chain I tend to prefer teaching this way because once the learner has done that Target step they get access to reinforcement instead of in forward chaining when you fear not prompts for the first step you then have to problem through the entire rest of the chain before they can access reinforcement and if you remember the principles of reinforcement you'll know that the more immediately you can deliver reinforcement the more powerful that reinforcement is so we should try to reinforce as soon as possible after that learner exhibits the target Behavior then there's total task chaining which is when you're teaching every single step in the chain at once this typically works better for Learners who might know all the steps in the chain with relative Independence but for forget the order that they go in then there's shaping number nine which also involves breaking things down into steps but in a different way in shaping the behavior that you're trying to teach doesn't consist of multiple steps the teaching process consists of multiple steps shaping means that you already have a response and you're trying to change that one response into a different response and you can achieve this by changing what you reinforce that's the key here so say the target behavior is to Echo the word ball when instructed so the RBT says save ball the learner should say bald to then earn reinforcement in the case of shaping let's say that when the RBT says save ball the learner goes blah that's not the target response but we can start shaping it toward that response RBT says say ball the client says blah he gets reinforcement once he consistently does that then we shape that response closer to the terminal response of saying ball so the learner's mastered saying blah in response to ball now we don't give reinforcement for when the client says blah when told to say ball we only give reinforcement when the client says all and told to say ball we're basically putting that incorrect response on extinction we're not reinforcing it we're only reinforcing the correct response that's how we shape the response I can't emphasize this enough you have to understand that the basic mechanism of shaping is changing what you choose to reinforce differentially reinforcing excessive approximations toward the final response that you're looking for in terms of practical application you don't really have to worry about this too much because the bcba will oversee the shaping process and essentially tell you exactly what to do what to reinforce what not to reinforce but you'd have to demonstrate a basic understanding of what shaping is then there's discrimination training which is pretty simple and straightforward you're basically teaching the learner to discriminate between two different things if the bcba says show me discrimination training you could literally just do this hold up two different things and say which one is pink and then if the bcba selects this one you deliver some kind of reinforcer like praise if you say which one is pink and the bcba selects this one you need to be able to demonstrate error correction or prompting so that the bcba emits the correct response before getting your reinforcer next we have stimulus control transfer essentially you're transferring stimulus control from one antecedent stimulus to another this basically means that if a learner demonstrates a certain response under one condition you're transferring that to another condition my favorite example of this is actually an animal training example so say a dog sits when you point to the ground but you want the dog to sit when you say sit so what you do is you transfer the stimulus control of that sitting response from the point to the instruction sit you do this by putting those two antecedent stimuli together so I would say sit the dog will sit because I'm pointing to the ground but I'm also saying sit so over time I can fade out the point and just say sit that's me transferring stimulus control from the point to the vocal instruction sit you can demonstrate stimulus control transfer within the context of prompt fading because essentially your transferring stimulus control from the SD with a prompt to the SD without a prompt so for example if your teach watching the learner to clap their hands when instructed you would start by saying clap your hands and then modeling the response so the response is under the stimulus control of the instruction and the model prompt then you want to transfer stimulus control to just the instruction Clap Your Hands by fading out that model prompt so you're transferring stimulus control from this clap your hands to this clap your hands I hope that makes sense the next one is token systems recap letter token system is you're essentially giving a token when the learner emits a correct response and once the learner earns a certain number of tokens those tokens can be exchanged for a backup reinforcer usually some kind of tangible or activity reinforcer I've seen this most often used in the context of discrete trial training or dtt in which the learner has to work on learning targets at the table correct responses earn them tokens and then say once the learner earns 10 tokens they can exchange those tokens for access to a preferred video or free time with toys the bcba will probably provide you with a token board or a set of items to be used as tokens they might specify the reinforcement schedule that you're supposed to follow maybe they want you to deliver tokens on an fr1 schedule or a VR2 so make sure to go back and review the basic schedules of reinforcement so that you're prepared for this the most important feature of the token system is that those tokens once they're all earned should be exchanged for a backup reinforcer so don't forget this part you can demonstrate token systems with the context of dtt so actually you can demonstrate several of these skills all at once so you could say I'm going to show you token systems prompting and prompt fading stimulus control transfer discrimination training and discrete trial trainings all at the same time because you can use all of those things all at the same time I just realized I skipped the prompting section I feel like I touched on it a little bit with the stimulus control transfer part but I'm going to go back over it again so prompting make sure that you understand most least prompting versus least to most prompting make sure you know what errorless prompting is don't confuse this with error correction they're literally the opposite of each other there are so many different types of prompts and prompting methods prompting is literally how we teach in ABA so there's so much content here that I can't cover in a short video Google eBay prompting look it up on YouTube Google images of prompt hierarchies so you get an understanding of least to most versus most to least prompting different types of promptings of physical verbal visual the way I typically assess this is I say I want to teach this skill with a gesture prompt I want you to present this prompt errorlessly and I want you to fade it up cross trials so I'll give some context I'll explain the procedure because the bcba is the one that sets the prompting procedures usually the key is that you'll understand that terminology and be able to demonstrate that prompting strategy when instructed item number 14 is Crisis slash emergency so implementing crisis or emergency procedures according to protocol and this is a role play or with a client item hopefully you're not having to demonstrate a crisis or emergency procedure in Viva with a client necessarily during your competency assessment so more than likely you'll be doing this in a role play the bcba might throw a scenario at you in which you have to act out the emergency procedures say for example a client engages in severely aggressive behavior what antecedent and consequence strategies are you going to use to de-escalate and minimize risk you might also be asked to demonstrate what to do in a medical emergency or what you would do if the client elopes and it's an unsafe area the last item in the skill acquisition and behavior reduction section is to demonstrate treat one of three tasks so antecedent intervention differential reinforcement or Extinction with a client or in a role play you should be able to demonstrate all three of these because all three are essential to Aba for antecedent interventions you're looking at what the antecedent or proactive strategies are for the behavior plan for that client so if you're doing this with a client just ask to see the behavior plan and then demonstrate those antecedent interventions I've done a separate video on how to implement behavior intervention plans and the essential features of those so you can go back and watch those for additional Insight on antecedent interventions next is differential reinforcement this is very critical for you to know differential reinforcement is when you reinforce one thing and not something else for example if you're working on reducing a challenging behavior and teaching a replacement Behavior you're reinforcing that replacement Behavior usually that's functional communication using your words you're giving reinforcement for the client doing that instead of reinforcing a challenging Behavior you're differentiating what you reinforce and then there's the extinction major which goes along with differential reinforcement in that you're not reinforcing a challenging Behavior or a behavior that you're trying to reduce Extinction is function based so it doesn't necessarily mean ignoring ignoring is only Extinction if the behavior is attention seeking keep that in mind if the behavior is seeking access to a tangible Extinction would mean withholding access to a tangible so Extinction should be written into a behavior intervention plan for the client if you're demonstrating it with a client make sure to read that behavior intervention plan and then you can demonstrate Extinction within the context of that otherwise the bcba might set up a role play scenario in which they explain the behavior that you're trying to put on extinction okay now we're to the professionalism and requirements section item number 16 is session notes so generate objective session notes by describing what occurred during sessions this is going to vary from one agency to the next as far as what the expectations are for your session notes but generally speaking you're giving some context to the data you collect during your sessions explaining what kind of reinforcement procedures you use what kind of prompting procedures do you use the effects of those things make sure that you're using objective language so nothing subjective like Jimmy was happy during the session explain how you knew he was happy he was smiling frequent back and forth conversation so on so forth make sure you get prior training with the agency's expectations are for this one and you can demonstrate this with a client during a practice session in role play with the bcba or in an interview number 17 is client dignity the bcba might give you some specific scenarios to work with like how do you maintain client dignity during toileting routines at an ABA Center how do you maintain client dignity when you're transitioning the client to their next therapist if you work in a center and you have to explain how the session went maybe it didn't go so great but you don't want to make the client feel bad by talking about their challenging behaviors in front of them how do you maintain client dignity within the context of ensuring that the client can make choices are you giving your client a stay in their treatment number 18 is professional boundaries make sure you're able to explain how to maintain those professional boundaries with your supervisor with your clients and with your client family the key phrase here is multiple relationships you want to avoid multiple relationships with these people this is also called dual relationships make sure that your relationship is strictly professional in nature and doesn't develop into a friendship or romantic relationship make sure to review the RBT code of ethics for more information on this but some specific examples would include making sure not to provide babysitting services for your client number 19 is supervision requirements all of this is outlined in the RBT handbook the most important thing for you to know about this is that five percent of your therapy hours need to be supervised by your bcba there are some other details you need to know like how much of your supervised time can be in a group setting versus individual how many contacts with your supervisor do you need per month how many of those need to be in person so make sure to go back and review those details and the last item on this assessment is number 20 clinical Direction it says describe at least one situation in which you'd seek clinical direction from your supervisor this one's super easy guys all you have to say is if I have questions about a program I'm not sure how to run it that's a great example of a situation in which you would seek clinical Direction that's literally what bcbas are for all the tasks and the professionalism and requirements section allow you to demonstrate the skill in an interview format so this can just be a question and answer type of thing okay there's your guide to passing the RBT competency assessment I hope this was helpful it's kind of hard to explain without being able to demonstrate it Hands-On if you have any questions be sure to leave those in the comments down below thank you for watching [Music] thank you