Newsletter
Volume 31 | 2008 | Number 3
New Zealand ABA
By Dr. Louis S. Leland, Jr. and Dr. Oliver Mudford
The New Zealand ABA (NZABA) chapter has 73 names on its list, most of whom are staff and students of the seven universities in New Zealand. Some also have other roles (in addition to being staff or students) including therapists, horse trainers, and business consultants. As you will see below, the branch made a good contribution to the 2007 ABAI conference in Sydney (approximately 1200 ocean miles west of us) and recently held its own (5th) annual (2008) conference at the University of Otago in Dunedin New Zealand. Prior to being NZABA we were NZBAG (New Zealand Behaviour Analysis Group) and before that, the Behaviour Analysis Division of the New Zealand Psychological Society. The Dunedin conference featured twenty-one papers and one poster. The student prize was won by Mary Armistead for her paper Behavioural Economics: Demand for Different Feeds with Horses. The judges thought that “It was an interesting combination of a behavioural paradigm" (Behavioural Economics) and “an applied problem (food preferences in horses)” (Aslop 2008). Our official website is www.nzaba.org.
NZABA Continuing Education Report for 2007
There was one special event organised for two BACB CEUs in 2007. This was a presentation by Professor Jeff Sigafoos (University of Tasmania) on “Behavioral Flexibility in Children with Autism”, followed by discussion with all attending BCBAs on: Heward, W. L. (2005). Reasons applied behavior analysis is good for education and why those reasons have been insufficient. In W. L. Heward et al. (Eds.), Focus on behavior analysis in education (pp. 316-348). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Further CEUs were available for New Zealand BCBAs at the Sydney International ABA conference.& New Zealand behaviour analysts contributed presentations at which other BCBAs could earn CEUs at that conference.