The Shriver Center Behavioral Technology Group is one of the world's leaders in stimulus control research. The Group is the current expression of a program founded nearly forty years ago by Murray Sidman at the Massachusetts General Hospital. It has been constituted to develop the scientific foundation for effective teaching and evaluation of individuals with intellectual disabilities, particularly those for whom special education is ineffective. The program is strongly directed toward teaching applications in communication, functional academics (e.g., word recognition, counting, etc.), and their behavioral prerequisites (e.g., attending to relevant aspects of instructional stimuli). The long-term goal of the Group is to develop a true technology of teaching. By a true technology is meant a scientifically well-grounded body of detailed procedural knowledge that permits one to (1) specify a given set of entry behavioral prerequisites, (2) build upon those prerequisites with systematic, well-defined teaching procedures, and (3) assure a positive teaching outcome. A central feature of the Group's research is the use of computer technology to support effective, efficient learning. Since 1984, the Behavioral Technology Group has received more than $15,000,000 in NIH funding to support its programs and has contributed more than 200 publications to professional journals and other scholarly outlets.
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