Association for Behavior Analysis International

The law of effect has been a fundamental principle of behaviour analysis since 1898, but is it true and is it helpful? I will review a series of recent results from animals that question this law, and suggest an alternative conception that may understand some troubling results, and may imply some changes in the application of behaviour analysis.

We will describe four-year outcome data for 35 children. IQ's rose from 61 to 76, with 49% of the children showing much larger gains. IQ's for these Rapid Learners increased to 103. The second speaker will present preliminary data for 8 children from sites in Vancouver, BC and Sydney Australia who received Parent Directed supervision (3 hours every other week). IQ's of these children increased from 60 to 94. More children will be tested prior to the conference, increasing the size of this sample. Children on a waiting list were tested at intake and approximately one year later when treatment began, thus creating a measure of the effects of available community treatment. Results for 11 children (sample size will increase by the time of the conference), showed a decline in IQ of 4 points. In addition to IQ scores, we will also present data in language and adaptive areas for each of these studies. Finally, we will present strategies used to arrive at the outcomes noted above. These include the use of a heirarchical supervision model, several updated intervention strategies for building skills as well as social interaction, and a set of interventions to overcome problems that arise during treatment.

From a baseline of near-zero, university courses in behaviour analysis have increased dramatically over recent years in many corners of the globe. This symposium brings together the founders of behavioural courses from Europe (UK and Norway) and Australasia (New Zealand) to share their experiences and, hopefully, stimulate future courses.

Skinners status is widely acknowledged as experimenter, engineer, and theorist. Equally important is his role as a visionary. He analyzed what behavioral science implied for ethical issues and raised concerns about social practices. In the explicit tradition of utopian thinkers, he dramatized these issues and concerns in his utopian novel, Walden II. This presentation presents a synopsis of these issues and concerns, linking their relevance to contemporary problems and quoting from his book in Skinners own voice.

There are two BACB-approved postgraduate training courses in New Zealand, at the University of Auckland and the University of Waikato. The symposium will show the types of research projects that our students conduct at different points in their courses. Academic faculty, current and former students of our programmes will present brief reports of research undertaken in recent years.

Treatments based on applied behavior analysis (ABA) have been scientifically demonstrated to be the most effective option for young children with autism. However, more research is needed in order to identify the most effective procedures, both for the assessment and reduction of challenging behavior, as well as teaching adaptive behavior. This symposium includes three presentations on empirical research on a variety of topics in the assessment and treatment of the behavior of individuals with autism, covering topics such as toilet training, preference assessment, and functional assessment. The symposium will be concluded with a discussion of the presentations.

A public health approach to parenting intervention offers communities an increasingly evidence-based suite of interventions for strengthening parenting skills at a whole of population level. As experience in the practical implementation of such a strategy develops, some of the special challenges begin to emerge. These include how to evaluate such whole of population interventions, dealing with ethnic diversity, managing program fidelity and program drift, and how to secure political and multiagency support. This presentation uses the experience of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program to review the evidence that underpins the public health approach and discusses a range of professional issues that may influence the effectiveness of the approach.

Deficits in interpersonal or social competency is a core feature of children with autism. Interpersonal competency has been defined as specific, identifiable skills that form the basis of social interactions, such as the contextually appropriate application of motor, cognitive, and affective behaviors. The literature is replete with various applications of ABA-oriented social skills programs. However, many programs are limited to acquisition of isolated social behaviors, or small changes in such, without pervasive generalization and maintenance effects. As well, only recently have we started to address deficits in perspective taking and the autistic childs predictions and responses to how others behave in social contexts. This presentation will focus on interventions that have been empirically verified, and have shown the most promise in terms of generalization and maintenance of interpersonal competency for children with autism. These interventions focus on such behaviors as greetings, social initiation, perspective taking, and verbal interactions. Procedures to be discussed will include Naturalistic Teaching Strategies, Incidental Teaching, Video Modeling, and Photo Scheduling. The efficacy of these types of interventions for interpersonal competency will be discussed.

In this panel discussion, we will show some highlights of the video record of a retirement celebration for Donald M. Baer, an eminent professor and scholar in behavioral science and a founder of applied behavior analysis. Four distinguished behavior analysts from Australia and New Zealand who were students and colleagues of Baer will serve as panelists to discuss the video and their recollections of working with Baer. In April of 2002, colleagues and friends of Baer gathered at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Over 100 participants from around the world celebrated in anticipation of Baers retirement. The retirement festivities included both scholarly and social agendas. The scholarship took the form of a research seminar with invited speakers, followed by interactive discussions in which Baer served as impromptu discussant. The seminar was followed by a banquet and an evening of commentaries by many of Baers friends and colleagues, in a joyful tribute of respect, love, and good humor. Baers untimely death only two weeks after the retirement celebration placed the events in an entirely new context. The video record provides young behavior analysts around the world a glimpse of an intellectual leader of applied behavior analysis.

We present four sets of experiments and observations about findings devoted to (a) the relations between observing responses and verbal capabilities or their underpinnings, (b) the role of multiple exemplar experiences in the acquisition of naming, and (c) procedures for effective parenting.

Applied behavior analysiss (ABA) pragmatic, natural science approach to discovering environmental variables that reliably influence socially significant behavior and to developing a technology that takes practical advantage of those discoveries offers humankind our best hope for solving many of our problems. Unfortunately, ABA has had limited impact on society. Using public education as the exemplar, this presentation will explore the question, If ABA is so wonderful, why dont we (society) make greater use of it? Improving the effectiveness of education is one of societys most important problems, and for more than four decades applied behavior analysis has provided powerful demonstrations of how it can promote learning in the classroom. In spite of this evidence, behavior analysis is, at best, a bit player in efforts to reform education. Dr. Heward will identify a dozen reasons why ABA is ideally suited to help improve education, review a somewhat longer list of reasons that work against the widespread adoption of behavioral approaches in education, and suggest some actions that practitioners and researchers can take to enhance and further ABAs contributions to effective education.

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder, characterized by global and often severe deficits in virtually all areas of functioning. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the only treatment for autism with consistent scientific support. Nevertheless, many myths regarding the inadequacies of ABA persist. Commonly stated, yet unsubstantiated, criticisms include that ABA is only for young children, does not address complex social behavior, produces only rote or scripted improvements in behavior, and cannot address issues of complex cognitive functioning. In this symposium, we begin by describing the basic components of a comprehensive ABA program for children with autism and proceed with in-depth descriptions of how to teach play, language, and executive function.

The Center for Autism and Related Disorders is a global organization which provides comprehensive behavioral services for children with autism. This presentation provides an overview of the CARD treatment model and describes the primary components of a comprehensive ABA program for children with autism. Goals of assessment and intervention, as well as teaching strategies such as discrete trial training, natural environment training, and fluency training, will be described and discussed.

For more than 15-years, the Institute for Applied Behavior Analysis (IABA) has been engaged in widespread training and dissemination of ABA in support of people with challenging behavior in Australia and New Zealand. This has included lecture courses covering basic principles; practicum training; and the training of trainers. Well over a thousand trainees have participated in these programs from all seven Australian states and from both the North and South Islands of New Zealand. The results of this training and dissemination program have been reported in the literature in a number of journal articles. This two part symposium brings this literature up to date, with reports at the state and agency levels on systems impact (Part A) and with a number of Type III case studies demonstrating effectiveness across a wide range of behaviors and clientele, including those typically not represented in the published literature (Part B).

Psychology 106 (Psychology applied to daily living: Dealing with friends, alcohol, and sex) and its supporting structure are the product of analyzing literature on AIDS prevention, especially the work of Kelly and his associates (e.g., Kelly, 1995a, 1995b) and the Fishers (e.g. Fisher et al., 1996), and several years of our own research (Brigham, Gilbert, Donahoe, Thomas, & Zemke, 2002; Horn & Brigham, 1996; Lindemann, Brigham, Harbke, and Alexander, 2005). The resulting program has several critical features worth noting. First, as a graded one-credit course offered as an optional component of Introductory Psychology, it has both academic and experiential content. Second, the course involves small sections of approximately 20 students with instruction based on discussion and exercises with minimal lecture. Third, students actively and systematically collect data on their own behavior and evaluate the information in relation to their own goals and values. Fourth, teams of two junior-senior-level undergraduate peer instructors trained in both the course content and instructional procedures teach the sections. Finally, information on HIV/AIDS is presented within the context of an integrated conceptual framework for personal and sexual decision-making that also covers other STIs, sexual assault, and related issues. The features of the program have evolved as a function of experimental and qualitative research and continue to be assessed each time the class is taught. The results of several experiments assessing the effectiveness of the program show it reduces student high-risk sexual behavior, reduces student alcohol consumption and increases the numbers of students practicing abstinence. The American Association of Colleges and Universities has recognized the course as a model AIDS education and prevention program. Also, the course is currently taught at several other universities across the United States and we are working to introduce it at universities in South Africa.

Although behavior analytic methods have proved effective for building a wide array of communication skills in young children with autism, there is a paucity of research on procedures for promoting certain skills in that domain. We describe three investigations of procedures for teaching skills ranging from discriminating simple auditory stimuli to producing syntactically correct utterances. Implications for designing and implementing communication training curricula for learners with autism and related disorders are discussed.

Dementia is the largest single contributor to the cost of care in nursing homes today, and the prevalence of dementia continues to increase at a much greater rate than both the total population and the older population. Dementia is associated with a decline in reasoning, memory, and other cognitive functioning that often results in challenging or disruptive behaviors such as agitation, aggression, repetitive questioning, and wandering. This decline also impairs the ability of the person to carry out many activities of daily living. The physical environment and well-meaning caregivers can exacerbate these behavioral excesses and deficits. Nursing home staff often ignores independent behaviors, but respond to dependent behaviors with enabling responses. This presentation will describe a range of environmental redesign and staff training procedures that have been demonstrated to help people with dementia engage in life and re-acquire a number of daily living.

For more than 15-years, the Institute for Applied Behavior Analysis (IABA) has been engaged in widespread training and dissemination of ABA in support of people with challenging behavior in Australia and New Zealand. This has included lecture courses covering basic principles; practicum training; and the training of trainers. Well over a thousand trainees have participated in these programs from all seven Australian states and from both the North and South Islands of New Zealand. The results of this training and dissemination program have been reported in the literature in a number of journal articles. This two part symposium brings this literature up to date, with reports at the state and agency levels on systems impact (Part A) and with a number of Type III case studies demonstrating effectiveness across a wide range of behaviors and clientele, including those typically not represented in the published literature (Part B).