Sidney W. and Janet R. Bijou Fellowship Recipients
2009: Kevin Luczynski, Western New England College
Kevin Luczynski was first exposed to the natural science approach to understanding human behavior at Illinois State University with Dr. Tom Critchfield. Kevin then received training on the Neurobehavioral Unit at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. While at KKI, Dr. Sung Woo Kahng and Dr. David Kuhn provided Kevin with daily supervision on how to effectively assess and treat severe problem behavior. The intensity of the clinical services at KKI facilitated his understanding of single-subject methodology, environmental determinants of behavior, and the value of working within a community of clinical experts. While providing clinical services and participating in ongoing research at KKI, Kevin earned a Masters degree at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County.
To further his training in child development and behavior analysis, Kevin enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of Kansas under the supervision of Dr. Gregory Hanley. Kevin had the opportunity to co-design and implement effective and preferred classroom environments for young children with and without disabilities while facilitating the teaching skills of his practicum students as a supervisor in the university-based Child Development Center (CDC). His time in the CDC inspired research focused on determining the efficacy of and preference for different schedules of social interaction. Kevin’s work demonstrated that children preferred contingent reinforcement (CR) to noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) under various conditions in which different schedules, response types, and reinforcers were arranged. Kevin also extended this work by demonstrating the boundaries of such preferences (e.g., children may prefer NCR when the CR schedule is leaned) and by evaluating children’s preference for certain practical reinforcement schedules (e.g., multiple schedules versus signaled delays). Kevin’s work at KU embodied the notion that identifying effective and preferred contexts is possible when designing healthy environments for young children.
Kevin transitioned to Massachusetts to complete his doctorate in the Western New England College Behavior Analysis Doctoral program when Dr. Hanley assumed the role of Director of this new program. Since coming to WNEC, Kevin gained experience teaching children with autism at the New England Center for Children and completed a study on the impact of inter-teaching intervals on the acquisition of mands. Recently, Kevin received one of two Fellowships from WNEC which provides support and opportunities for supervised teaching at the College and applied research in the Springfield area. As a Fellow, Kevin has allowed his work at KU and NECC to inform his new focus on studying the acquisition, generalization, and maintenance of critical social behaviors of preschoolers, such as requesting attention and assistance and tolerating delays for these same events. To that end, Kevin has designed a series of studies which will provide systematic replications of efficacious interventions while also serving as baselines from which to evaluate new independent variables for promoting generalization and maintenance of acquired social skills. After discovering conditions that result in lasting and generalized behavior change of preschoolers and completing his Ph.D. program, Kevin hopes to provide service, research, and teaching opportunities to his own students in an academic context that supports a behavior analytic approach to understanding child development.
Other 2009 Recipient:
Cara Phillips, University of Florida
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