Transcript for:
BCBA Task List Study Guide Overview

- Alright, welcome back to part two of our six edition BCBA Task list study guide. We are continuing with F and we're going to go through the end of the study guide today. Our third part will be on ethics. We keep ethics separate. It's just kind of a standalone set of items. So that's going to be the third and final part. As always, be sure to like and subscribe for all of our content. We do three BCBA videos a week. We're going to be making individual videos for each task list item like we did with the fifth edition. When you pass your exam, let us know so we can include you in the Sunday. Shout out, check out behavior analysts study.com. For all of us study materials, including this study guide and our practice exams. The link is below. Other than that, keep working hard, keep studying hard. Let's get going. Let's start with F1. Identify relevant sources of information in records at the outset of the case. When you begin a case, the first thing you want to do before anything else is look at past records. Especially now if you have clients who are 5, 6, 7, 8, or older. Most of these children are getting services at a very young age, so there should be, or there typically is going to be some sort of historical record and at the very least, some sort of medical record. Now, you're not gonna be making decisions based on records alone because these are indirect assessments, right? And we don't want to make decisions exclusively on indirect assessments. But they're gonna give you good background about the client. So when we think about educational records, we think about IEPs, individual education plans, 5 0 4 plans, MDTs grades, anything else related to the educational history of our clients outside of maybe the home life. The school, if your client is in school, is gonna be typically the second most important environment. In a lot of cases, we might consider it the most important environment at certain points in their life. So understanding their education background, extremely important. Medical medications, diagnoses, allergies. We're not medical doctors, right? And we're not going to be making medical recommendations, but understanding their medication history, how it might affect their mood, their behavior. Do they have dual diagnoses? Are they allergic to anything? If you plan on bringing food reinforcers, these kind of ideas are going to guide your assessments. Additionally, let's say there's other behaviors like wetting the bed or headbanging yourself injury that are related to medical needs. That's also going to help you distinguish between what you should be and shouldn't be working on. And then historical records or primary, primarily, primarily concerned with prior a b, A services. So treatment plans and behavior plans, what worked, what hasn't. But we also want to get an idea of other therapies, speech and occupational therapy, physical therapy. What have they gone through in the past? Has it been effective? What worked, what didn't? We're not gonna plagiarize other people's work. But again, all of this is indirect information that will guide your treatment planning. F two, identify and integrate relevant cultural variables in the assessment process. New to the six edition are these ideas of cultural variables, respecting others' cultures, respecting norms. And the reason for that is we are now dealing with a diverse group of clientele, all with different backgrounds, different cultures, and when we're doing behavior therapy, we're working on behavior, right? We're teaching things, we're unteaching things. We have to be considerate of the family or the stakeholder culture in which we are delivering these services. It's all about human behavior. And human behavior is directly linked to cultural variables. These things include language and values, traditions, norms. So while we, let's for example, shy away from punishment when we can help it in a, b, A, there are some cultures that are more accepting of punishment and some may want you to actively use punishment. Now, when we are thinking about assessment in terms of culture, there are a couple things we're gonna talk about. 'cause we're also gonna talk about culture as far as service goes. But when we're thinking about assessment, the first thing we wanna think about is the language. What's the primary language spoken in the home? For example, if you live in somewhere like California or Nevada, you might get in homes where English is not the primary language and that might be much more common living, let's say on the West coast, but all across the country, right? We're a very diverse country. And so you're going to be in situations where if you're in home, it might not be the primary language. Are you able to effectively handle behavior in treat behavior? If the language isn't your primary language, that's something you need to consider prior to taking on the case. What about the values and beliefs? Get to know what the family values as far as education, career, happiness, religion, what are their goals? Some family have, some families value education very highly, some value, happiness, very highly, some value, getting a good career as the most important thing. You've gotta understand these values to shape what you're going to try to achieve with your client. What about their beliefs on with punishment? What are their beliefs on personal and professional relationships? Some families will take you in and essentially make you part of their family. Others will strictly view you as a service provider and will go actively go out of their way to make sure that nothing more than being a service provider is established relationship wise. And that's what you have to respect just based on the family's values and beliefs. What about social norms or they matriarchal? Are they patriarchal? Who's the leader of the family? What are the family roles? What are the gender roles? And all of these things, right? You might be saying, well, what are my beliefs? While important, our number one objective is making the client's life better. There will be situations where you may not agree with norms or values and beliefs with the family. And unless it's to an extreme extent, that rarely should stop you from helping the client, especially when you're dealing with children who aren't making these decisions. So you have to learn to respect values and beliefs and norms of other cultures because you're going to be dealing with the values and beliefs and norms of other cultures. And so when you're doing your assessment, these are all things you need to start to understand and consider about the family. F three, design and evaluate assessments of relevant skill, strengths and areas of need. The main idea here is we evaluate skills and strengths and then areas of need, right? Because we write skill acquisition plans and we write behavior change plans. And so really two umbrellas that we deal in is increasing skills and decreasing challenging behaviors. Now, how you design and evaluate your assessments are going to be dependent on your resources. The client's developmental level, their age, the stakeholder involvement. All these things will play a part. So there are several assessments that are pre-written. Things like VB Maps and ables and the P-D-D-B-I peak and SRS. Some of these might even be required by insurance. Do you have to use these standardized assessments? No. They can be expensive and you might not have access. You might have not have time, but you still need to do a systematic evaluation of strengths and weaknesses. Typically, we are trying to approach things from a strength-based methodology where we are reliant and focused more on the strengths of the client rather than their weaknesses. If we can build up their strengths, hopefully that will lead to improve improvement on the areas of weakness. But again, strength and deficits help guide your skill acquisition plans. That's going to give you an idea, what skills can I teach and what behaviors do I need to maybe decrease? We're trying, again, to avoid looking at behavior from a deficit point of view. We wanna know what are they good at, what can they do already? What do we need to improve? What about their areas of need? Are they socially significant? Always have that in the back of your mind. Are they, are areas of need meaningful? Are they socially significant or are they just valuable to a very small set of core people in this person's life? You have to consider your time and your resources when addressing the areas of change. Now, this idea verse of a skill deficit versus a performance problem. With a skill deficit, the client is unable to do it under any circumstances. So for example, I offer a person a million dollars to play the Star-Spangled Banner on the piano. If they can't play the piano, they won't be able to do it. A performance problem. They have the skill, but they can't perform it when needed. So if someone is able to play the Star Spangled banner, but then they get to a recital and can't do it, that's a performance problem. You have to evaluate, is it the actual ability and the skill level, or is it an environmental issue for your client? F four, design and evaluate preference assessments. Preference assessments should be very easy, especially if you've worked as an RBT. Preference. Assessments don't change, right? The key here is they're not reinforcer assessments. Preference assessments. Identify potential reinforcers. Preference assessments are identifying what does someone like, what do they not like? A reinforcer assessment is when we're actually looking at how that stimulus is changing behavior. So what are our different preference assessments? Well, we have interviews where you can simply ask the client or stakeholder what they like. Not very scientific, but not the worst way to get an idea of where to start. Right? Asking the mom, what are five things the client likes is a good place to gather stimuli for a more systematic approach. Free operant. Free operant. Think of it as client led. You're allowing the client to roam free in their environment and you're just recording items they engage with, you're not really giving direction. You're not telling them where to go, what to do necessarily. You're just observing single stimulus. You're presenting one item at a time and recording the response. So if I have items one, two, and three, I'm going to present one item one and record response. And then I'm going, I'm going to present item two, and then I'm going to present item three. Each item is presented one at a time with a forced choice. We're going to present two items at a time and ask the client to pick. So let's say we have again, one, two, and three. This time I'll present one and two, two and three and one and three. Forced choice is very good at establishing a hierarchy. 'cause every item is being compared against every other item. When we think preference assessments, always ask yourself, how many items am I assessing at this time? Single is going to be one, fourth choice will be two. And then we have our multiple stimuli, which will be typically three plus. That's a good way to identify quickly what you're working with. Multiple stimulus with replacement, that's exactly what it sounds like. Let's say you have items 1, 2, 3, 4, and they pick four. Well, you're going to replace one, two, and three. Let's say 5, 6, 7, and then you'll have four, right? And you can rearrange these, but the one that was picked was put back and then you replace the other items. Multiple stimulus without replacement. Exactly what it sounds like. Four items. One is picked, and then what do you do? You remove the one that is picked. Preference assessments, very, very straightforward. F five, design and evaluate descriptive assessments. A descriptive assessment is essentially just a direct observation of the problem behavior in the natural environment. We are observing the behavior and we're learning about the behavior and we're trying to get a better idea of what happens before and what happens after the behavior. So our design, you're gonna use tools like a, B, C, recording, event recording, narrative recording. What's the relevant information? What are the antecedents? What are the consequences? We are trying to describe exactly what is going on with the behavior in the environment before and after when, how, what, right? You're asking all these questions about the behavior and then you're gonna take that data and you're going to evaluate that data to try to find patterns and common ant antecedents and consequences. What is the descriptive assessment going to lead to? If we have our indirect assessments and we think about descriptive assessments as kind of direct, what is that going to lead to? Once we have all this information? Well, now we're going to design and evaluate our functional analysis. Remember, the functional analysis is the best way to identify the function of a behavior. We've done our direct, we've done our indirect, and now we're on a functional analysis. That's kind of the order of operations. Here. We are actually manipulating antecedents and consequences. How do we do that? What we have conditions we have the alone, the attention, the escape, and the play control. The escape can also be called the demand condition. Think about 'em in terms of function though, right? With the alone condition. What are we testing for? We're testing for automatic behavior. How do we do that? Well, you leave the participant alone safely. If the behavior continues at the high rates when alone and they have access to everything they want, including attention in toys, then we can start to hypothesize the function as automatic or sensory attention. Of course, we're assessing attention when the behavior occurs, we give attention to the behavior. So in a functional analysis, you're essentially giving the person what they want, right? You're reinforcing the behavior purposely. If under the attention condition, the behavior continues and we give it con and we give it attention, and the attention decreases the behavior, and then the behavior continues to occur. Attention is likely a function escape or the the demand condition. You give a demand when the behavior occurs, the stimulus or demand is stopped or removed. If the behavior stops when the stimulus is removed or resumes when the stimulus is added, again, the function is likely escape avoidance. All that's a complicated way to say is if you give a demand, behavior occurs and you allow escape and the behavior stops. We can hypothesize it's escape. Again, don't overcomplicate fas. Just think about if my client is engaging in behavior for retention, I give them attention and the behavior stops and then they do it more and more and more to get more attention. We're hypothesizing the behavior is for attention. And then the control condition. The participant has free access to all reinforcement. We expect low rates of target behavior in this scenario. F seven, interpret assessment data to determine the need for behavior analytic services and a referral to others. So before we take on clients, we want to identify is there a need, right? Or do we need to refer to others? So what are some questions we have to ask ourselves? One, is there a need for behavior analytics services? Do the behaviors require our special services, right? There are a lot of people who need what we do and we want to be sure we're giving our services to those in need. Or are the behaviors just typical of the age or developmental level? We need things that are going to be socially valid if we change them. Does the analyst have time to take the case? Do you have the resources? If you've got 12 cases already, should you be taking four more on? It's a question you have to ask yourself. That's gonna be very challenging to do a good job on all 16 of those cases. Do you have the competency to take one the case, right? Typically many, if not most of you will be dealing with autism, but now our clients are Optum going to have things like A DHD, right? But what if they have other diagnoses? Bipolar disorder, for example, depression, anxiety. All of these things are things you have to factor in when you consider competency. If they have a severe feeding disorder, right? If they have a severe health impairment, are you competent to take on the case? What about does the need fall within the scope of the behavior? Does the, does the need fall within the scope of behavior analysis? Meaning do our behavior services address the need of the client? In other words, if they are depressed and they need a talk therapist, will our behavior services help that client? And does the analyst have resources? Do you have enough rbt? Do you have enough materials? Can you adequately service the client? What about evaluating the client's specific needs? Well, we have to think about the behaviors of interest and the impact on day-to-day living. What about the impact the client has on those around them? When we take on clients, we don't just take on the client, we take around, we take on their environment as well. Have we cleared all medical options? And is a BA the best option? And then of course, our behaviors, socially significant. F eight, interpret assessment data to identify and prioritize socially significant client informed and culturally responsive behavior change procedures and goals. Long item, what are we? What are we talking about here? Skills and behaviors should all be socially significant. Let's start there. What is social significance? Social significance are behaviors that have immediate or long-term benefits. These are meaningful behaviors in their life. Do these behaviors enable the client to contact the natural environment more? Are they important to the client, the family and society? We want to address behaviors of interest to the client and the family, but we don't want to spend time on things that are not going to impact their lives in a meaningful way. Then identifying goals. How do we identify goals? Well, through our assessments that we just went over, right? Interviews and surveys, direct assessments. We can evaluate developmental levels directly through observations. We simply identify goals based on assessment data we've already taken. What does it mean to be client informed? The client should be as involved as possible. Do we only listen to client and stakeholders? Meaning do we take their opinion as the end all be all? No, because you're the expert. They're not. But they do need to be included in treatment planning as much as possible, especially if you're going to make a major change. They have to be part of that change. The client should have a say in what they're going through and being provided each day to a certain extent. Obviously age and developmental level is going to affect client involvement, but you've got to get them involved as much as possible. And then culturally responsive. Be mindful of the culture you learned about during your assessments, right? So you can start to see everything's building on top of each other. Are you including their culture? Are you including their language? Are you including their beliefs? Now, this again is going to be as an analyst, a difficult part of your job where you've gotta balance the needs of the client and the wants of the client and stakeholders. What is that? Perfect? Middle right? How can we meet in the middle between needs and wants? F nine, interpret functional assessment data. Kind of a continuation of F eight, right? We're still evaluating the data we took and making determinations based on that data. So if we think about our functional behavior assessment, we should have plenty of records and interviews and surveys and descriptive data and maybe even a functional analysis. From all that information, you should be able to start to formulate a plan. That indirect assessment right, was the lowest form. These are just interviews, checklists, and surveys. We're not actually observing anything. These are much more subjective based on provided information. You should always use a direct observation. Always, always, always, always. So indirect observations are good. Always, always, always include a direct observation. Now, what does a direct observation mean? We're actually observing the person of interest and taking data on behavior. This could be a B, c data, event recording, narrative recording, actually observing the environment and the behavior that is happening, what's happening before, what's happening after. And then finally, the anecdotal observation, or I'm sorry, not finally. The final one would be the functional analysis, right? This is the highest form of FBA. We're actually manipulating antecedents and consequences to determine the function of those behaviors. So it goes indirect, direct into a functional analysis. We also have these anecdotal observations where we are recording descriptive sequence accounts of behaviors, things like a, B, c, recording. That's just a type of descriptive or direct observation. Okay? G one, design and evaluate positive and negative reinforcement procedures. We are now getting into kind of the meat of the task list. We've covered a lot of the basics. We've covered assessment. Now we're gonna start designing and that's gonna start of course with reinforcement. We are reinforcement based therapy, right? We use punishment, we use extinction. We always wanna try to start with reinforcement. We try to increase and teach the right thing. Reinforcement increases or maintains future behavior, right? That is what we have to remember about reinforcement. If behavior increases in the future, we consider the consequence reinforcement. So you have positive reinforcement where a stimulus is presented or added after a response that increases that response. In the future, you have negative reinforcement or a stimulus is removed after a response. That increases that response in the future. So positive and negative only indicate whether the stimulus is added or removed. In both cases, reinforcement will still increase that behavior. I put habilitation and habitation under reinforcement just because it's behavior change. If we think about habilitation, it's when a person's repertoire has been changed so that reinforcement is maximized and punishers are minimized When you are trying to habilitate somebody or you are focused on habilitation, you're just trying to make the person better at interacting with the natural environment, contacting reinforcement, reducing punishment. The other idea of habitation don't confuse these two. Habitation is much more related to respondent behavior. It's a decrease in res, in a response to repeated presentation of a stimulus. Think about if you hear thunder the first time you might jump. You may even scream a little bit. If you hear thunder again after a short period of time, your reaction to that thunder is going to go down. You are. You have been habituated that it is is an example of habitation. Now, design and evaluate differential reinforcement procedures with and without extinction. It's interesting. I think that they've included this distinction of without extinction, there's been a push in recent years for trying to avoid extinction in a way that we avoid punishment. And again, it's not to say extinction and punishment don't have their place. They just have a much more or a potential mu a potentially they have a more effect on clients, right? To put it nicely, okay? Extinction and punishment both lead to emotional responses. They can lead, lead to aggression. They can be much more difficult for stakeholders and parents and others. So when we're designing our procedures, if we can just focus on reinforcement, that's fantastic. Is it always possible? Of course not. Now, differential reinforcement, classic different differential reinforcement is reinforcing the desired behavior while putting the other behaviors on extinction. So reinforce something, put something else on extinction. You reinforce a child asking a nicely for an apple. You put screaming on extinction. What are the different types? Well, we have DRI and DRA. How do we know these? These teach replacement or alternative behaviors, right? The only difference between the DRI and the DRA is the DRI teaches something incompatible. And the DRA teaches an alternate meaning if it's incompatible, then the replacement behavior can't occur at the same time as the old behavior. They are incompatible. If Kevin elopes from his seat and he is only reinforced if he's sitting in his seat, well he can't be in his seat and out of his seat at the same time. That's incompatible. Alternative behaviors. Behaviors that can occur at the same time. So if we are trying to reinforce Karen for raising her hand instead of screaming, well, she can raise her hand and scream at the same time, right? But we are only going to reinforce for what? For when she raises her hand. Now, DRO is a little different because now we're reinforcing in the absence of a target behavior, you are reinforcing for a behavior not occurring. If we're targeting hair pulling, if Julie doesn't pull hair for three minutes, she's reinforced. Notice we don't teach an alternative with DRO, right? We're only reinforcing for a behavior not happening. Functional communication training is when we're reinforcing functional communication in place of maladaptive behavior. So you teach your client to ask for a break instead of running away. DRL Differential reinforcement of lower rates of behavior. Remember, the only two that are teaching replacements are DRI and DRA. The rest were teach were either increasing or decreasing in behaviors that already exist without a focus on a replacement. So with the DRL lower rates, you're not necessarily eliminating the behavior, but you are reinforcing if the behavior happens less than a specified amount, you can use an inter response time or a criterion, an interval, meaning if we're trying to lower the rate of behavior, we're going to try to increase the inter response time. Or we can set a criterion in an interval, meaning the behavior can't happen more than four times in two minutes. So either approach is okay with our DRL procedure. Then finally we have DRH and DRD. The DRH is where we are trying to increase a current behavior. So higher rates, you're reinforcing if the behavior happens more than a specified amount. So again, let's say we want the behavior to happen four or more times in two minutes. Now we're trying to increase the current behavior. And then DRDD, differential reinforcement of diminishing rates. It's very similar to DRL, right? We're lowering rates of behavior reinforced only if behavior occurs less than a set criterion. So with the DRD, we're not gonna use an inter response time model, right? We're going to try to just set a criteria on and then decrease that behavior lower and lower and lower. So again, behavior has to happen three or less times in one minute. Two, get reinforcement. Differential reinforcement. Very straightforward, right? Reinforce one thing. Put other behaviors on extinction. If we can only focus on the reinforcement aspect, that is ideal. But as we know, that's not always possible. G three, design and evaluate time-based reinforcement. So fixed time schedules, for example, right? We also have variable time schedules, time-based reinforcement. We're delivering reinforcement at predetermined intervals regardless of the target behavior occurring or not. Now, what does that mean? Like think non-contingent reinforcement, right? We're trying to just deliver reinforcement on a schedule. So if we have a fixed time schedule, we have a learner receiving attention every eight minutes no matter what they are doing. This is very similar, right to non-Contingent reinforcement reinforcement's deliver based on an amount of time, fixed time schedules work to manipulate motivating operations. How? Well, if we're delivering what the client wants on a fixed amount of time, we're hopefully reducing the value of what they want, reducing the motivation to engage in problem behaviors to earn what they want. So that's the entire idea behind the fixed time schedule or time-based reinforcement where we're delivering reinforcement in order to manipulate moss and decrease problem behavior. G four, identify procedures to establish and use conditioned reinforcers. What is a conditioned reinforcer? We also call the secondary reinforcement. Okay? These are reinforcers that are paired with primary or established reinforcement. So if you take a neutral stimulus and you pair it with something that is already reinforcing, we can create this conditioned reinforcer. So tokens are a fantastic example. Tokens by nature are not reinforcing until they're paired with backup reinforcement. Those are conditioned. How do you establish them? Well, we just went over it, right? You take a neutral stimulus, you pair it with a reinforcing stimulus by presenting it repeatedly until that neutral item becomes reinforcing. How do we implement this? Well, once they're conditioned, you can use them just like any other reinforcement. And hopefully you can start to create generalized condition reinforcement where you can use these items in a variety of situations for different behaviors. Tokens and money are the two best things to think about when you think condition reinforcement, right? Until money is paired with items you can buy, money has no value. Young children don't understand the value of money, even though we buy them items because they don't understand the connection and it's never been paired that money and items go together. Once we start pairing money with items, money starts to serve as a very strong reinforcer. So you can implement 'em. You can use a token economy system, right? For example, conditioned reinforcement is implemented just like unconditioned, right? A primary reinforcement. Use them when the situation calls for it and use them when the client is motivated to earn those reinforcers. Establishing good condition reinforcements. Very important to avoid satiation on already. Pre-established reinforcers. Now, we talked a little bit about generalized condition reinforcers. These are reinforcement that can be used in a variety of situa situations and a variety of behaviors. So think tokens, think praise. They're just easy to move, easy to use, very able to quickly use them in a variety of situations. G five, incorporate motivating operations and discriminative stimuli into behavior change procedures. MOS can be very challenging when we first start out, when people first start, okay, I want you to think about motivating operations as making you want something or not want something. They change the value of a consequence, okay? SDS signal they, they are available. For instance, I'm hungry, which is increasing the value of food. So I want chicken tacos. However, until there is an SD signaling, the availability of chicken tacos, I can't get those chicken tacos. The MO is increasing the value of the food. I need the SD to signal that the food is available. When we think about MOS and sds, these are antecedents, right? They come before the behavior. But when we act on MOS and SDS and even prompts, we're looking at antecedent interventions. Antecedent interventions are preventative. 'cause we're manipulating things to prevent behavior from happening. If we know Johnny makes a huge mess, well with the ball pit, we take away the ball pit before session. We are manipulating the environments with the behavior can't happen. Don't overwhelm yourself with motivating operations, okay? Think about them as making you temporarily want something more or want something less due to satiation and deprivation. When you want something, you're going to act in a way to get it. The SD is going to signal its availability. That's the easiest way to remember it. mos, make you want or not want? Yes, D signals the availability of what you want or don't want. G six, design and evaluate procedures to produce simple and conditional discriminations. Well, we talked about differential reinforcement. And differential reinforcement teaches simple and conditional discriminations. So for example, if I have a square and I have a triangle, and I tell you to point to square, I'm going to reinforce you. When you point to square and put this on extinction over time, you can discriminate between the square and the triangle because of differential reinforcement. And now you're discriminating between these stimuli. Simple as that. Right? Now, what is the difference between a simple and a conditional dis discrimination? With a simple discrimination, you are responding to a single antecedent stimulus. So I have square, I have circle, I have triangle. If I just show you a picture of a square, you pick square. Very simple. Discrimination, right? There are no additional antecedents leading to your choice. With conditional discrimination, you're responding based on multiple antecedent stimuli. So if someone says, get them a drink, you might just go to the fridge and grab a drink. That's very simple. But they also say, I want one that has no sugar. So our antecedents now are get them the drink, which is our first antecedent. And then I want something that has no sugar. So now what do you have to do? Well, now you've gotta discriminate between the sugar drink and the no sugar drink. Why? What's conditional on them saying, I want something that has no sugar. If they just told you, get them a drink, you just have to go grab anything in the fridge. The condition now is something that has no sugar. Discrimination is taught using differential reinforcement. It's going to help your learner start to be able to tell the difference between stimuli G seven and G eight. Select and evaluate stimulus and response prompting procedures. Design and implement procedures to face stimulus and response prompts. Prompting. If you are an RBT, this should be already pretty familiar to you right now we have stimulus prompts and we have response prompts. Stimulus prompts act on the stimulus being used. So again, let's say we have shape cards. I've got a square, I've got a circle, I've got a triangle. A stimulus prompt is going to act on these stimuli. I might change the position of a stimulus. I can change the size of a stimulus. All we're doing here is acting on the stimuli. We're still trying to evoke a certain response, but we're changing the stimuli involved. Now, response prompt prompts act on the desired response. So if my desired response is point, 0.2, square, I want them to point. I might verbalize point, I might model pointing. I might gesture for point, or I might help physically point. I'm acting on the response itself. Key difference not to challenging, right? When we talk about our hierarchy, right, we're typically talking most to least and least to most. Most to least very intrusive. So we're talking errorless prompts, which is the highest form of most to least. Because with errorless, you aren't allowing errors to occur at all. You're doing anything you can to prevent an error. So most to least might go errorless to physical, to graduated guidance, to modeling, right? This is our hierarchy. And then we're gonna keep going down least to most is the opposite, least to most. The first level is going to be giving a res, giving a instruction and letting the person try and fail if they fail. And then we might start to introduce verbal prompts or let's say positional prompts or other, let's say gestural prompts, right? Not quite physical prompts yet. Not quite errorless, not quite modeling, but we're just getting very, or we're just trying to stay as least intrusive as possible while still presenting prompts after prompt. If you've got a client who is prone to prompt dependency, least to most might be a good option. Graduated guidance is the type of physical prompting where we're adding as much physical prompting as necessary and then fading immediately. You're gradually guiding as necessary. And then a prompt delay, right? We always want to fade prompts as quickly as possible because prompts are temporary sds, and we want our real SD to evoke behavior. With a prompt delay, we're gonna increase the time between the SD and the prompt. So at first we might go SD immediately to prompt. Then we might go SD four seconds prompt. That is a prompt delay. It helps fade out the prompts. Why do we fade prompts? Because we need to transfer control to the real sd. Do not prompt indefinitely. You're doing a disservice to your client. G nine, design and evaluate modeling procedures. Modeling is directly tied to imitation. It is planned, it is contrived, it is systematic. You are planning your model, okay? How? First identify your target behavior. What do you want to teach? Then you have to know that your learner has attending skills, right? They can attend to a model, 'cause you're going to train the model to perform the behavior with accuracy. You wanna focus on critical aspects of the behavior. You wanna exaggerate critical aspects of the behavior. 'cause you're hoping that your learner imitates you. So include as many verbal and physical characteristics as possible. What do we need to be sure of? Before modeling? Can your learner attend to a model? Does your learner copy a model? Do they accurately and immediately copy the model? There's no use in modeling. If your learner doesn't have a attending or imitation skills. G 10 design and evaluate instructions and rules. The difference between instructions and rules. It's a little vague right now. We think of instructions and rules as both informing a learner of what they should or shouldn't be doing. Okay? These can be vocal, they can be written. They can be typed. Think of instructions as a prompt, right? They're just a prompt that's telling you what to do. When you write instructions, use developmentally appropriate language. Include expectations and non-examples, rules, or an actual contingency, right? So instructions might just say, do 10 math problems. That might be an instruction or a recipe. First, add butter. Then this and this, and this. Rules is gonna be a statement of a contingency where you're actually stating you need to do this. If you do this, then this happens. You're stating something that's controlling behavior that isn't actually meeting the consequence. But you are stating what happens if they don't or do the behavior. So for example, the rule is wait 30 minutes before going in the pool, or you'll get sick. What's the contingency? You wait 30 minutes. The consequence is you don't get sick. If you don't wait 30 minutes, you will get sick. So the rule is having has stimulus control over the behavior, even though the person's never contacted the actual contingency. Once the contingency is contacted, then that behavior becomes contingency shaped. G 11 shape dimensions of behavior. Shaping is something that is crucial to teaching. Shaping is one of the most powerful things that we do when we're shaping, we're using differential reinforcement on successive approximations of behavior. What are successive approximations? They're steps or smaller responses that lead to a final or terminal response. The final response is what we're teaching. For example, I'm teaching the word firetruck. My terminal behavior is firetruck. I first reinforce the PHI sound. That's my first approximation. Second approximation fire. Fire is our third approximation. Final terminal approximation is fire truck. As it builds, we're gonna reinforce for the target approximation and put other approximations on extinction. Now, when we're shaping, we can do it in a couple different ways. We can shape across topographies, and that's used when you want to change the form of a behavior into something new. Or you can shape what the top biographies when you want to change a dimension. So if you want to change the actual behavior, how it looks and how it appears. So you want to teach the word green from GU to GR to green. You're shaping across, you're changing the topography, shaping within. You've already got the form down, right? So let's say you've already got green in the repertoire. Now you want it louder or less often. Now you're just changing a dimension. So shaping across, you're changing the actual behavior itself. Shaping within. You're just changing some dimension of that behavior. G 12, select and implement chaining procedures. A behavior chain is created using a task analysis. Task analysis breaks down complex behavior into steps, which creates the behavior chain. Pretty straightforward. Cooper recommends three ways to conduct a task analysis. Three good ways to conduct a task analysis. The first observe. Observe someone competent, performing the sequence. That could be an expert, that can be someone you know knows how to do the skill. Make sure they're competent. Two, consult with experts or persons skilled in performing the task. If you're trying to learn to play music, go find a music teacher. Ask them what the chain might look like. Three, perform the behavior yourself and adjust as necessary. Notice that they do not recommend using someone of the same age. Age is a very bad and misleading trait, okay? Especially for people we tend to work with. So observe someone competent. Consult with an expert, or perform the behavior yourself. What are the different ways to teach? Well, we can use forward chaining where we teach and reinforce the first step. So you would have step one, which would lead to reinforcement, and then you would prompt two, prompt three, prompt four, right? And you'd have one, reinforce. Two, reinforce. Prompt three, prompt four. We're teaching from the very beginning, backwards, chaining. It's gonna be the opposite, right? We'll prompt one, prompt two, prompt three. We're getting them to the end. To the end. And then we're gonna reinforce four. And prompt one, prompt two, reinforce three, reinforce four. Perfect, right? That's the difference between backwards and forwards. Chaing not very complicated. Why would you use backwards? Chaing sometimes if your client is prone to escape. This gets them through the thing, through the skill faster. And then escape is the reinforcement. Sometimes it's gonna be more feasible given maybe resource constraints. It's gonna be dependent on your needs and the client's needs. Total task chaining. We are teaching every single step, right? So we're just gonna go 1, 2, 3, 4, teaching as we go. And then hopefully reinforcing, right? This is gonna help us identify maybe two needs, a little more work, but they know the rest of the chain. A behavior chain interruption strategy. You're purposely changing or interrupting a chain in order to, in order to evoke a new or novel response. In other words, if I have steps 1, 2, 3, and four, and we've mastered that, one of the keys of behavior chain interruption is the essential steps have been mastered. I might let the client go to one and two, and then in between three and four, I might throw a monkey wrench in, right? I might move in a a crucial item in the environment, okay? I might say something. I might do something to interrupt the chain. Forcing the learner to engage in a novel step. So let's call that three A. So we've added a new novel behavior that I purposefully interrupted the chain, and then a behavior chain with a limited hold. This is a behavior chain that involves one or more steps that must be completed within a certain amount of time. So let's say we have one, we have two, and then step three, you have 20 seconds to complete. Step three or step four can't be done. That's a behavior chain with a limited. Hold your time. You're putting certain behaviors on a timer. G 13, design and evaluate trial based and free operant training procedures. When we think about our training procedures, we think of discrete trial. We think of naturalistic. We think of free operant. These are the big three. DTT is probably the most well known. This is trial based. It's a traditional A, B, A teaching with a clear, beginning, middle, and end. What is the proper order? We give an SD prompt if necessary. The response comes, we deliver the consequence. We get deliver bit of feedback. Pause. Reintroduce sd. This is very rapid. DT T is very controlled. It's very systematic. It's very quick. It's great for teaching behavior strengthening behaviors. You can run a lot of targets very quickly. You can deliver a lot of feedback quickly. It isn't great for generalizing skills. Typically, you'll be at a table, you sit here, client here or wherever, and you're just running drills over and over and over again. Very good for teaching new things, for things, for strengthening skills. Clearly it's not great for generalization 'cause not a lot is changing to promote generalization. Then you have naturalistic. So from DTT, we can have naturalistic teaching. Naturalistic or incidental teaching should be done all the time with naturalistic. You're just in the environment, right? If this is your environment and DTT happens at the table, then teaching naturally happens all over your environment. You're just taking advantage of naturally occurring situations to teach. Use the environment to your advantage. Finally, free operating. You're letting the child lead. You're not necessarily giving instruction, giving sds. You're just watching the child and reacting to what the child does in teaching that way. G 14, design and evaluate group contingencies. When we have group contingencies, we have one. We have, well, obviously two or more people in a group, and each contingency involves a certain portion of that group. For example, if we have a dependent group contingency, this is called the hero procedure or contingency. Because if I have five people, reinforcement is going to depend on one or let's say one to four of those people. So not the entire group. In other words, there's a hero. If I have five people and I pick person three, if person three engages in the contingency, the whole group gets reinforcement. If person three fails, nobody gets reinforcement. The whole group is dependent on person three, independent. Each individual is responsible for themselves by have five people. Person one's responsible for themself, 2, 3, 4, but they live in their own bubbles. Each person do not. Each person is re responsible for their own rewards, and they don't rely on other members of the group. Everybody is independent and then interdependent. The group contingency rewards the group when the entire group engages in the target behavior. So if I have five people, then all five of these people are a team. They're working together. They all must meet the contingency. The whole group must perform the response. Everybody is interdependent. G 15, design and evaluate procedures to promote stimulus and response generalization. Why would we have to design procedures to promote generalization? Because we plan for generalization. We don't wait around and hope and pray that generalization occurs. We have to plan for it. We have to teach it. How do we do that? First things first, right? You wanna start with a general case analysis. This should be number one. General case analysis is when you go into the generalized environment, the natural environment, and you identify teaching examples. So if you need to teach stuff at the grocery store, you go to the grocery store and you identify critical components of that environment from the general case, then you can start to intervene. You can train loosely, train loosely. You are varying non-critical aspects of the environment. You're doing this. So non-critical aspects of the environment don't obtain stimulus control. If you're in a classroom, you might change posters on the wall. You might change certain seats. Things that aren't critical to the behavior occurring that you want to make sure don't develop stimulus control over the behavior. Indiscriminate contingencies, the learner does not know when a reinforcement will come. This is kinda like a variable schedule, right? You have a thin schedule, you have a variable schedule. A learner must keep engaging in the response to get reinforcement. Multiple exemplars, you're practicing with many different stimuli and response variations. So you're TR training a bunch of examples. Train loosely is noncritical examples, multiple exemplars. You're using examples that are relevant or that might occur. Programming common stimuli is more focused compared to multiple exemplars. With programming common stimuli, you're taking what you learn from your general case analysis and teaching what's actually in the environment. So train loosely is noncritical. Multiple exemplars are just a bunch of different examples. Programming common stimuli are specific examples to the environment. And then natural contingencies are contingencies that occur naturally, right? That is always the goal. We want behavior to contact natural reinforcement, G 16 design and evaluate procedures to maintain desired behavior change following intervention. What does that mean? That is just maintenance. We want behavior change to continue once intervention is over. So once we withdraw teaching, we want that behavior to continue. How can we do it? Well, we can fade prompts, we can fade instructions, we can fade, antecedent, manipulations. Then reinforcement schedules. You're basically trying to go from a very controlled behavior change system to something that could just naturally occur in the environment. Schedule thinning is huge. For example, you go from, let's say an FR one to an FR four to a VR six, right? You're, you're thinning, you're thinning, you're thinning, you're thinning. And then you get to a schedule where reinforcements not delivered all that often. You want to transfer to naturally occurring reinforcers. So tokens and candy, two, social praise. You wanna use those generalization strategies we just talked about with fading strategies. Maintenance is just a subset of generalization. So you're also training for maintenance. And then we can also teach self-management. Self-management is very important. It's the personal application of behavior change, producing a change in behavior, sometimes referred to as self-control. With self-monitoring, you're observing and responding to your behavior. You're trying to change. So you're watching and observing your own behavior, maybe taking data, self-evaluation. You're actually evaluating your performance against standards. And self instruction is like self-talk. You're prompting yourself through a situation, and then mass practice, you're performing the undesired behavior repeatedly in an effort to reduce the behavior. If we could teach self-management, that's gonna be a great way for someone to maintain their behavior without needing us around. Habit reversal has to do with identifying behaviors as they occur and stopping them before they continue. So if you've got a behavior chain that is five steps long habit reversal would be identifying the behavior at step two and then stopping it before you get three, four, and 5G 17 design and evaluate positive and negative punishment. Now, just like reinforcement, that increases punishment always decreases. This is what you must remember about reinforcement and punishment. Reinforcement always increases punishment always decreases. Punishment reduces the future currents of behavior. Punishment is not permanent, which is why we have to include reinforcement when using a punishment procedure. Timeout is one of very common type of punishment procedure. It's a temporary removal or restriction to a reinforcer. So for example, the exclusionary timeout, you remove the child from the environment altogether, the non exclusionary timeout, the child stays in the environment, but reinforcement is taken away. Partition timeout. It's an exclusion procedure where they remain in the setting, but behind some sort of barrier, or let's say a timeout ribbon, you mark the child with a ribbon, a wristband that now says they can't receive reinforcement for a certain amount of time. A response cost. Response cost is when you remove reinforcement in the presence of mal maladaptive behavior. This is very common in token economies. Let's say your client has earned three tokens. They then engage in a response. What do you do? You take away a token. Now they have two. So you're removing previously earned reinforcement, positive practice overcorrection. We are having the client do the correct behavior over and over and over again with negative practice overcorrection, you're having the client perform the wrong behavior over and over and over again, or the restitution, over correction or restitutional overcorrection. You're having the client return the environment to a better condition than before. So they're repairing the environment and going above and beyond and making it even better than it was previously. G 18, evaluate emotional and elicited effects of behavior change procedures. It is interesting that even on the task list now, 'cause this is new, we are acknowledging the emotional effects of behavior change, thoughts, feelings, or private events, although we can't observe them, have to be taken into consideration. So when we do our interventions, they can lead to emotional responses. Things like aggression, anxiety, frustration. We have to be aware of our procedures effects on these behaviors. If there are emotional responses from extinction and punishment, how are we gonna handle that? Do we have to use extinction and punishment? Are we inducing aggression? Are we causing anxiety? You've gotta be aware of these things, right? We now have to consider these things when designing interventions. What about elicited behaviors like crying, hand flapping, sweating, an increase in heart rate? Are we causing these things? If we are, is it a cost of doing business? And we're gonna talk about cost benefit analysis. You've gotta weigh the cost against the benefits of certain behavior change procedures. If the emotional effects are too extreme or too high, is there something we need to change to better serve our client in a way that won't lead to these very intense and aggressive emotional moments? G 19, design and evaluate procedures to promote emergent relations and generative performance. Finishing with G 19, this used to be our stimulus equivalence. Now we're looking at emergent relations and generative performance. What's the difference with emergent relations? We have untrained responses developed based on learned associations or concepts. So for example, if we teach a client to manipulate objects and they can add two objects to another object, and they get three objects, and then they go on and say, well, if I have two objects and I subtract one object, then that's gonna equal one object. Well, they've taken what they've, they've learned what these objects adding and just generated, or the response of subtraction has emerged with generative performance. We take known skills that create new combinations of behavior. So generative performance allows for other knowledge to be acquired or skills to be acquired quickr quicker based on old skills. So known skills can lead to new combinations of behavior. Stimulus equivalence, training. We're teaching symmetry. We're teaching reflexivity. We're trying to produce transitivity without teaching. And then matrix training is a very difficult and obscure concept that you should only focus on if you really believe you're a hundred percent fluent everywhere else. Okay? Matrix training. We combine known concepts into different configurations. So a learner knows, throw the ball and catch the fly. So now they say, catch the ball. An advanced, advanced, advanced idea that we wanna focus on only once we've mastered everything else. Develop intervention goals and observable and measurable terms. Just like behavior definitions. We're going to write goals that are observable and measurable. If you can't measure a goal, how do we ever expect to know when we've achieved it? Right? That sounds very obvious. 'cause it is. A lot of this stuff is not meant to be complicated. A lot of it is very straightforward and obvious once you get the hang of it, okay, it can be challenging at first, but when it clicks, you're like, well, that makes a lot of sense. Our goals need to be observ, observable, and measurable. So we know and we've achieved them. So when we're talking goals, we wanna be objective. It's based on data and a set criteria. It's based on an assessment. We want them to be observable. Yes, private events like we just talked about as far as emotions and feelings and thoughts are concerned or important. But when we're talking goals, we're typically focused on public events because we can actually reliably measure those. So when we talk about measurable, it's behaviors we can see things we can measure, and then you wanna be clear, you wanna be technological, something that's easy to read, something that's easy to understand, easy to replicate, easy to reliably do over and over and over again. You can also state non examples. So what are you not measuring? What doesn't count towards your goal? So for example, and goals can always be better. Let's look at task avoidance. Does not include looking up from work for less than 10 seconds. This is a good non-example, okay? Where if the client or whoever looks up from work for six seconds, that does not constitute task avoidance. A good example of a non-example. You wanna plan for the short term. You wanna plan for the long term. So you want to ask in the beginning, your stakeholders or your clients, whoever, what are you trying to achieve? Let's say in three months. What about six months? What about five years from now? Goals should be short term, but they should build towards the long term. H two, identify and recommend interventions based on assessment results, scientific evidence, client preferences, and contextual fit. All right? Another very long task list item. We're talking about interventions based on assessment results. Let's start there, right? What did the functional behavior assessments say? What did your indirect data say? What did your direct data, what did the functional analysis data say? That's where you wanna start. What does the assessment say about our goals and our interventions? Scientific, scientific evidence, right? So ongoing research, you as a behavior analyst, should be up to date as much as possible on research in our field. What is currently trending? What is not? What is falling out of favor? Is there a new strategy that we can incorporate? You want to be science-based, right? You wanna be empirical Client preferences always take into consideration what the client wants and doesn't want. If you've got two equal interventions that are likely to have the same effect, what does the client prefer? Right? We always want to involve the client as much as possible. Other factors may include preference assessments, medical assessments, prior intervention history. A lot of this should feel like we're repeating stuff that we've talked about already. All the task list does, and it's laid out in a way that it builds on top of each other. Okay? We've gone from our terminology, our basics, our assessments, and all of that is going towards interventions where we're just taking the same approaches. Again, we're back to cultural vari variables. What does the family client value? How can you incorporate their values into your treatment planning? We've got to respect other cultures. We've got to educate ourselves on other cultures and then client preference, right? We've talked about it, but the client should always be involved in treatment planning to the fullest extent possible. You can see the heavy emphasis on culture and on client involvement and collaboration in this task list, right? We wanna be empirical, but we're also very, very, very focused on the client's wellbeing. H three socially valid alternative behavior to be established or increased when a target behavior is to be decreased. So when we are selecting a replacement, right, we want that replacement to be a socially valid alternative, something that's going to make sense. All behavior serves a function. If you get rid of a behavior, you're removing something functional from that learner's repertoire. So you're removing the, the ability of the learner to do something. You need to replace that behavior with something that meets the same need. Behaviors and skills that we focus on are important to the client, the family, and society. You can't just take behaviors away from somebody and not give them a new one in its place. Think of what we would call the fair payer rule. When a behavior is decreased, another behavior must increase in its place. We have to help the client continue to meet their needs. When we talk about functional equivalents, we're talking about behaviors that meet the same functions. They, they, they, they serve the same purpose. For example, if you remove aggression for gaining access to the bathroom, we need to replace aggression because the client still needs to gain access to the bathroom. So we can do it by replacing it with, let's say, communication. H four plan for an attempt to mitigate possible unwanted effects. When using reinforcement extinction and punishment procedures, no matter how good you are, no matter how strong your treatment plan is, there always will be a possibility of something unwanted occurring due to one of our principles, which is reinforcement, extinction, and punishment. For example, reinforcement satiation might occur, our client might get tired of the reinforcement. We might decrease other functionally equivalent behaviors that aren't receiving reinforcement. We may reinforce an undesirable beha, undesirable behavior on accident, and there could be difficulty transit transitioning away from a reinforcer. How can we avoid these issues? Well, we can fade reinforcement quickly. We can try to reinforce all functional equivalent behaviors, which can be challenging. We can teach self-management. We can use incidental teaching. We can use a variety of reinforcers or we can use antecedent strategies with extinction. The intensity of the extinction burst could be high. It could be unethical and dangerous to put a behavior on extinction. Let's say self-injury. If a behavior is reinforced during extinction, then the reinforcement schedule may change. So with extinction, if we're gonna do extinction, what do we need to do? We need to do extinction reliably and consistently. What is this idea of resistance to extinction? It's the frequency at which behavior is emitted during extinction. A behavior with longer, with a longer reinforcement history can be harder to put on extinction and might still occur at a higher rate even when extinction is going on. So we've gotta be aware of resistance to extinction as we're going along. If we see that an an extinction burst is occurring, it's gotta be up to us to measure or or identify if it's worth proceeding. Given how much resistance is being put up, how can we avoid issues with extinction? We can plan for extinction burst and plan for spontaneous recovery. We know these things are likely to happen. We can make sure treatment fidelity is high before we implement extinction. We can ignore the behavior and not the child to avoid emotional repercussions. One of the biggest issues people make is they think extinction is just ignoring the person. We're not ignoring the person. We're we're ignoring the behavior. So we want to be aware of the effect of extinction on things like emotions and aggression and then punishment. Punishment can lead to punishment induced aggression. It can lead to resistance to punishment. There are ethical and legal violations to consider harm to client or others. Punishment is obviously something that needs to be very closely monitored and planned for. If we do intend to use punishment, H five plan for an attempt to mitigate possible relapse of the target behavior, what does that mean? Well, we typically might call this regression, right? Where a target behavior may come back if it reappears after the intervention is over. How can we plan for this? Well, what context or situations may lead to the behavior occurring? Just 'cause it's gone doesn't mean it's never going to happen again. When did the behavior used to occur? Be prepared in those situations for that behavior to occasionally come back. You can teach replacement behaviors. Behaviors are less likely to come back if there's something else in its place. Booster interventions. So you can occasionally reintroduce the intervention. Sometimes we call this maintenance trials, right? And then monitor and plan. We have to plan for that relapse. We have to plan for keeping behavior at a level that we want it. If we forget about the behavior, if we ignore the behavior, if we move on to other things, then there's a possibility that behavior can to peak out again, right? We have to plan for that and we have to monitor that. You have to have a plan for what happens if a behavior that was removed suddenly comes back. H six, make database decisions about procedural integrity. Now this is all about enter observer agreement and we don't wanna bog you down too much with IOA. What is I-O-A-I-O-A is when we have two or more people measuring the same thing and comparing those measurements, right? We're checking for treatment integrity. We're check checking for treatment fidelity. So I've got a three different, three or so different examples of methods of inter observer agreement, okay? Don't get overwhelmed by looking at this. These are just different ways to, to calculate IOA, right? Let's start with a total count. Enter observer agreement. It's the simplest. You just take the smaller count and divide it by the larger count, and it's gonna give you a percentage. So if your first observer measure three behaviors, your second observer measured five, you're going to divide the smaller by the larger and it's gonna give you 60% IOA 60% IOA. Not very good, right? IOA is measuring or or determining, are we both seeing the same thing? It's checking. Our definition is checking our measurements. It's checking our treatments. IOA is very important. Mean count per interval into observer agreement. We're now breaking up observation into intervals, right? And then you're gonna calculate the total count IOA for each interval. So for example, we have three intervals. The first interval, we have three and four, which comes out to 75%. Then we have a 50% IOA, and a hundred percent IOA average count per interval. We're gonna add all those up. We're gonna find the average. What's gonna give us 75%? It's impossible to learn this all right away, okay? So again, don't feel overwhelmed. We're just giving you examples of how we might calculate inter observer agreement. I recommend focusing on this, right? The actual calculations towards the end of your studies, okay? So you're not spending too much time and confusing yourself. Too much exact count per interval, IOA, again, breaking into intervals. It's the most strict. It's the percentage of intervals and which observers recorded the same count. So interval one, we have one and two exact no, three, three, yes. Two, three, no. What is the exact count? What's gonna be 33%? Only one outta three intervals. Agreed. Then trial by trial. Trial by trial, IOA, the number of intervals or trials in which the observers recorded the same occurrence or non occurrence. So again, we are looking at the the intervals, one, two, and three. The total data does not matter only whether or not there was a response. So an one, there are no responses. Interval two, we have a response, but no response, so we don't agree, right? In interval one, we did agree, and then interval three, we agreed again, which is going to give us 67%. We're simply just looking at how often do we agree on what we're measuring. That is what a is all about. Just gotta repeat it again, don't get bogged down in these calculations until you're very, very comfortable with everything else. Then come back here. Get a basic idea of the different ways to calculate IOAH seven. Make database decisions about the effectiveness of the intervention and the need for modification. When we are evaluating our interventions, we wanna be effective, right? It's one of our dimensions, and being effective means we're making meaningful change. We're actually making a difference. Okay? We're producing the desired or intended result. Just because something changes doesn't mean it was what we intended. We're not being in, we're not necessarily effective. But after you look at the data, you have three options, right? You can continue with the intervention unchanged. Maybe you saw progress, maybe the treatment was effective. You wanna give it more time, that's fine. You can continue with the intervention, but change it. Maybe there was no progress. Maybe you liked the progress, but you wanna modify it. Maybe you want progress quicker or you can just continue with the intervention all altogether, maybe data indicate that treatment is ineffective. Maybe we've hit our goal so you stop the treatment and design something else. Remember, treatment's gotta be organic. You don't get married to a treatment and you're constantly, constantly, constantly evaluating treatment and intervention, changing it as necessary. And H eight, collaborate with others who support and enhance client services. Collaboration is huge. Working with others to produce something. In our case, we want to produce positive and beneficial outcomes. We work on multi-disciplinary teams, meaning everybody with different skill sets work together. We provide a specific service to our clients, or we do it as a team. For example, you provide a B, A, they get speech, they get ot, they get school. This is their multidisciplinary team. We are a team. You want to share information, okay? You wanna be confidential, you wanna be private, but you wanna share what you know with the clients, other team members. It's not a time to be egotistic, right? Or think you're the best or hold a grudge against other team members. Your focus is always on the client first and foremost, and that means we must share what we know. You can obtain information, so seek out from other practitioners when necessary, go to the speech therapist, go to the teacher, ask them what do they see, what are they working on? Attend meetings. If you can, go to IEP meetings, go to other meetings as much as possible. Parent trainings are required by many insurances now and are essential to good service. Parents are part of the team. You've got to ensure they're properly trained. They are part of this multidisciplinary team, and then accept feedback and input. We don't know everything. It is our obligation to accept feedback and input from others. Even if it's not conceptually systematic. Take it. Maybe take data on the intervention, provide results. If we're working with speech, if we're working with OT or PT or teachers or whoever, they might have good feedback. Don't take it as an insult, right? Use it to better yourself. 'cause in the end, our only concern is the success and wellbeing of our client and the people around our client. Finally, I one, identify the benefits of using behavior analytics supervision. For this item, we are going to focus more on why we want to use supervision. Obviously, supervision is important. It's going to lead to hopefully better outcomes and improve staff performance and retention. But the only way these things can happen, and the only way we can ensure or reap the benefits of supervision is if we know what we're trying to supervise and what we're trying to correct. Meaning, what are some possible situations that we wanna be low on the lookout for as supervisors of technicians and supervisees? The first is treatment Drift. Treatment drift occurs when the intervention differs from the original design. So let's say you design a reinforcement schedule that is an FR two in the beginning, and now all of a sudden your supervisees are implementing a vr. Three treatment has started to drift. Good supervision is going to be able to catch this, fix it, and hopefully improve client outcomes and staff performance. Observer drift, the way the outcomes are measured start to change. So data collection is differing. For example, your supervisee should be measuring protest, but now they're measuring self stimulatory behavior or you said measure using frequency, but they're giving you duration. The observer drift has occurred. Reactivity treatment or measurement changes when the person being observed is aware they're being observed. When you are there supervising, your supervisee's behavior may change. When you're there, the client's behavior may change. These are all things to be aware of when you are conducting supervision. We can't have better outcomes and better staff performance and more retention if we are not doing a good job supervising. So what we're looking for is good procedural integrity and good treatment fidelity. How do we do that? Well, we're going to do a four step approach. We're gonna specify what we want. Our goals, we're going to train, we're going to monitor, and we're going to reinforce the client. We're gonna deliver the reinforcer, not the client, the supervising or the trainee. And it's funny, I said client because I always tell my students or when I'm in my videos, when you think of supervision and personnel management, think of it just like you manage clients, right? How do you change a client's behavior? You specify a goal, you train them, you monitor the change, and you deliver the reinforcer. Okay? Same thing here. When you're dealing with supervisees and personal management, it's just like client management. What is staff retention? Staff retention is when we are able to make sure our staff is staying with us. They're not quitting, they're not going to other jobs, they're staying on our team. They're staying with the same clients. A lot of times staff retention is not only about them staying with the company, but staying on cases. A good supervisor is going to make it where even the most challenging cases, you're able to keep a consistent technician or team of technicians and you don't always have to rotate through and teach new people over and over again because the case is too challenging or not enough supervision or whatever it may be. Staff retention is huge, and you're gonna notice that and see that once you start with your team of technicians. Turnover is very challenging in our field, is challenging on us. It's challenging on clients, so supportive supervision can reduce burnout. It can decrease resentment and promote job satisfaction, which can lead to less staff turnover and better outcomes. Identify and apply strategies for establishing effective supervisor relationships. Again, this just like client management. You should have and establish clear goals and expectations for your supervisees. You should also have goals in terms of how you're going to provide supervision. What are you trying to accomplish? Everything is still data-driven. This doesn't change, right? We're not now suddenly going to be subjective and not empirical and not data driven. Just because we're dealing with members of our team. Supervisors and supervisees should have a data recording system in place to make sure targets are being met and goals are being mastered. Importantly, there should always be a contract in place prior to the start of supervision. Very important to remember and that in that contract, you need to know expectations. You should outline on what the supervisor must do, outline what you're going to do, outline all the terms of that relationship. I three, identify and implement methods that promote equity and supervision practices. Essentially, this is saying everybody is an individual and you need to tailor your supervision to the needs of your supervisees. It's your responsibility to understand the needs of your staff and individual. Individualize your support based on those needs. Individualized support might look like supervisees have who have different methods of learning, different skill levels, different backgrounds. You might have a supervisee who's a rockstar, don't need a lot of supervision, don't need a lot of oversight, that's great. You might have another one who needs tons of training and tons of help. You can't judge the person who needs more training and help based on the ability of some of someone else. Each person should exist in their own vacuum, and you need to individualize your support based on their needs. Recognize bias. You're using objective data and observation to evaluate performance. You may not like your supervisees for whatever reason, but you should judge them on their work performance and nothing else. You've got to identify any biases you may have and do your best to eliminate them. Then establish the environment. You want to establish an environment where your supervisees are comfortable coming to you with problems or issues they may be having. You need to be a safe spot for them to vent and tell you their issues. If you are unapproachable, if they don't want to talk to you, it's only going to lead to bad outcomes for the person that matters, which is the client. I force select supervision goals based on an assessment of the supervisee skills, cultural variables, and the environment. Continuous, right? Establish goals the same way we set goals for the clients. Nothing we're doing here is any different than handling behavior of clients. Now we're just handling the behavior of our team. So for example, does your client need to work on behavior modification, data collection, parent report? Who, who, who or what are you trying to work on, right? What are their skills? What do they need to focus on? Your assessments are gonna be the same, right? Indirect. You interview your supervisee before the onset of supervision direct. You can directly observe your supervisee with clients, with parents and other staff, and then create your plan based on the assessment. This all sounds very similar 'cause it's not any different than conducting this assessment with a client rather than a team member. Your supervision is behavior analytic. You perform assessments and you write plans just like you would do with the client. I five identify and apply empirically validated and culturally responsive performance management procedures. When we are looking at performance management procedures, we're trying to use things like competency-based training where we are ensuring all providers are capable of good service, okay? RBS are essential in service delivery. We need to make sure we're taking care of them, being on the lookout for them and training them, right? How can we do that? Well, we can first describe the skill. What skill are you training? What is the goal? Develop a written plan. What is the plan for your supervisees? What do you hope to accomplish? How will you accomplish that with them? Model the skill. Perform the skill for your supervisee. One of the biggest complaints I see is I don't get enough modeling, right? They don't my, my supervisor doesn't model enough. Model what you want to see done. Then role play. Act out the skill with your supervisee. Once you've role-played, observe the supervisee, implementing the skill and then provide feedback. So we're going to establish a goal, write a plan, model, role play, observe, provide feedback. You want to approach your management procedures the same way you approach treatments and intervention. They're data based. They're empirical and they're culturally sensitive. You want to approach your management just like you do your client management. Supervisee management and client management are very, very, very alike. I six apply a function-based approach to assess and improve supervisee behavior. Just like clients, and we are trying to figure out performance issues. We want to identify the function of the behavior. Why is that behavior happening? Once we do this, we can approach it in different ways. Prevention, so antecedent interventions, antecedent interventions are preventative. What can we do to prevent poor treatment in the first place? Or being proactive or we can react. These are consequence interventions. How will you react to bad implementation? If it's good, are you gonna reinforce if it's bad? What are you gonna do about it? And then what about overall implementation? Why is it occurring? What is the function? Is the training poor? Is the environment poor? Is the direction poor? You have to figure out why these things are occurring and not just throw your hands up in the air and say, well, that person just doesn't get it. Why don't they get it? Performance monitoring can be direct or indirect, just like our client monitoring, right? Direct is observation in the field or during role play? Are you looking for knowledge of the treatment plan, treatment integrity, understanding of a, B, a concepts, interaction with stakeholders. What are you trying to identify and measure? Feedback should be direct, constructive, and based on services alone. You wanna identify what can be improved upon, how can they improve and give them an opportunity to ask questions. Reinforcement is crucial. You're always reinforcing good behavior. Supervising monitoring, very similar to client monitoring. Use reinforcement to strengthen behaviors you want to see, and then I seven, make databased decisions about the efficacy of supervisory practices. You have to also know, are you doing a good job? I don't Just assume you're the best supervisor on earth and you don't make mistakes. That's not true for anybody. You've gotta evaluate yourself. You want to ask for feedback from your supervisees and honest feedback. If you don't think it's gonna be honest, let them do it anonymously. Got to know how you're doing. Collect data. When does supervision start? Take data before and after and compare that data to evaluate the effects of supervision. Okay, that wraps up part two. All we have left now is our ethics section, which is going to be the part three or part three, the final part. Until then, make sure you subscribe for all of our updates. Check out behavior analyst study.com for all of 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. See you soon.