Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavior analysts recognize the importance of incorporating motivation and reinforcement within service delivery. Additionally, behavior analytic treatment programs incorporate effective function based procedures to increase compliance with demands and decrease escape maintained challenging behavior. These procedures often include forced physical prompting and paced prompts that may increase the occurrence of challenging behavior or reduce acceptance of the procedures by caregivers and staff. This symposium explores potential ethical alternatives to traditional escape extinction using 7 Steps to Earning Instructional Control, wait-outs, and conditioning work as a reinforcer that address the problems behavior analysts face with traditional escape extinction procedures in discrete trial programming.

Behavior analytic intervention programs frequently include the use of forced prompting to earn compliance with demands and reduce escape maintained challenging behavior. This approach is effective but can result in an increase in challenging behavior if the challenging behavior is also maintained by attention or can be difficult to implement with clients who are larger in size. Additionally, caregivers and staff may not accept the use of forced prompting and may not implement the procedure during the naturally occurring routine, which also reduces the effectiveness of the procedure. The purpose of this presentation is to explore ethical considerations regarding the use of forced prompting by drawing from the BACB Guidelines for Responsible Conduct and Van Houten et al. (1988). Additionally, the presentation will explore how the 7 Steps to Earning Instructional Control addresses these ethical considerations and whether research in the basic or applied areas supports alternatives to forced prompting such as the 7 Steps as viable options for reducing escape maintained challenging behavior.

Escape-avoidance behavior is a common impediment to skill acquisition and a frequent maintaining variable for a variety of behavioral excesses. While a great number of antecedent interventions (e.g., demand fading, student choice, errorless teaching) can decrease problem behavior levels, escape- avoidance behaviors do not immediately drop to zero levels, and reactive measures invariably account for some part of the behavior intervention plan. Among potential reactive treatments, escape extinction has the greatest empirical support and is typically recommended. This presentation will demonstrate the efficacy of an alternative to escape extinction in 3 studies across 5 participants. In this procedure, task resistance is followed by a temporary withdrawal of that task and a substantial limit upon student options until the task has been completed. Though counter-intuitive (because escape-maintained behavior produces temporary escape), this procedure, colloquially known as a wait out, tends to not only decrease escape-maintained behavior, but also to improve a number of qualities of student participation. Participants will learn the rationales behind the use of wait and will see examples of how to implement the procedure.