Association for Behavior Analysis International

Training staff is a critical component for the success of organizational interventions. Behavior analysts are often required to train staff for the organizations for whom they work or during consultations to meet the organizations goals to improve staff performance. Behavioral skills training (BST) is an effective method to training staff. BST usually includes interrelated components including instruction, modeling of the targeted skills, rehearsal, and praise or corrective feedback. In this symposium, three applications of BST will be described across three presentations. In the first presentation, the presenter will describe a study in which school staff were trained to help students initiate play with peers and engage in outdoor activities during recess. In the second presentation, the presenter will describe a study in which BST was used to train therapy staff to conduct visual analyses and make decisions based on their analyses. In the third presentation, the presenter will describe a study in which a component analysis was conducted on the components of BST within the context of training staff to implement discrete trial training procedures.

The target audience includes behavior analysts, both practitioners and researchers, who train staff or are involved in research of behavioral skills training. The contexts are applicable to those who work in organizational behavior management, and clinical and educational settings.

Data-based decision-making is an often neglected, yet extremely important behavior-analytic strategy. Behavior-analytic staff are often responsible for collecting and graphing data, but rarely analyze the data being graphed. In the current study, four employees at a behavioral organization were trained on simple visual analysis terms: level, trend, variability. Using the components of Behavioral Skills Training (BST) instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback staff were trained to interpret and make decisions based on the level, trend, and variability of the data. Implications include both autonomy on the part of behavioral staff and increases in independent work time for supervisors. As data are analyzed frequently, programs can be modified and adapted as necessary to promote the speed at which clients acquire the skills being taught.