Association for Behavior Analysis International

The Comprehensive Application of Behavior Analysis to Schooling (CABAS), a program based out of Teachers College, Columbia University, focuses on research devoted to increasing verbal behavior developmental cusps that increase student's academic achievement. In this symposium, four doctoral candidates will present the most recent research coming from the CABAS program. The first study researchers evaluate the effects of varying performance criteria level frequency values on response maintenance of listener responses of four preschool students with disabilities. The second study measures the effects of teaching relational responding across frames on language development for three preschoolers with disabilities. The third study evaluates the acquisition and maintenance of sight words with lower elementary students with disabilities. The final study measures the effects of a collaborative independent reading protocol on vocabulary acquisition, reading comprehension, and the reinforcement value for reading narrative and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) texts with third graders with and without disabilities. Studies were run in either pre-school classrooms with children with and without disabilities, lower elementary classrooms with children with disabilities, or inclusion, upper-elementary classrooms.

Participants should have a basic understanding of derived relational responding, mastery criterion, multiple exemplar instruction, and conditioned reinforcement.

The current article studied the effects of teaching relational responding across different levels, frames on language development for three preschoolers with developmental disabilities using a multiple probes design. Experimenters selected three preschoolers with developmental disabilities with incidental acquisition of the listener component of naming (UniN) at the onset of the study. The independent variable was the relational responding teaching procedure, which included two stages: Stage 1 taught the nonarbitrary relational responding across five frames and Stage 2 provided direct instruction on relative arbitrary relational responding and tested the untaught arbitrary relational responding following the mastering of the trained relational responding across same frames. The dependent variables were: 1) the degree of the incidental acquisition of listener and speaker component of naming (Inc-BiN), 2) the number of the correct responses on taught and novel nonarbitrary relations during the pre-or post-Stage 1-intervention probes and the number of the correct responses on taught and derived arbitrary relations during pre-or post-Stage 2-intervention probes, and 3) the number of correct mutual entailment (ME) and combinatorial entailment (CE) relational responses during the testing phases at the Stage 2. All three participants acquired the contextual cues as discriminative stimuli through the Stage 1 teaching, demonstrated higher level of responding on arbitrary relations after the Stage 2 teaching, and demonstrated criterion level on the derived arbitrary coordinative and comparative relations. However, there was no improvement on the degree of BiN for the three participants.

Research has demonstrated the positive effects on reading achievement measures when print stimuli and content are conditioned as reinforcers (Bly, 2019; Gentillini; 2019; Cumisky-Moore, 2017; Tsai & Greer, 2006). Previous research has focused on conditioning narrative texts on the relation to increased comprehension, with no current research on the effects of conditioning science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) texts. The current study examined whether the effects of conditioning narrative texts as a reinforcer extends to STEM texts for both typically developing and delayed third graders. Researchers replicated successful conditioning procedures used with elementary-aged participants in previous studies where narrative texts were conditioned. Using a four-step, peer-collaborative procedure, peers were used as the conditioned reinforcer to condition narrative texts. Participants engaged in independent reading, word activities, and conditioned seeing tasks within the intervention. Results indicated that reinforcement value of conditioned narrative texts does not transfer to STEM texts. The second study is underway and measuring the inverse relation. Researchers are conditioning STEM texts and measuring whether the reinforcement value transfers to literature texts. Researchers are adding additional academic achievement and vocabulary acquisition measures.