Association for Behavior Analysis International

Procedural fidelity is essential for ethical and effective service delivery, yet it is often treated as an afterthought—something to be checked off a list or overlooked entirely. In this presentation, I will challenge common assumptions about fidelity and highlight the critical role of fidelity in ensuring that our learners receive the services to which they consented. Drawing from applied and translational research in autism intervention, I will present practical, research-informed strategies for measuring fidelity in real-world settings where time and resources are often limited. Attendees will learn how to design sensitive and feasible fidelity measurement systems, distinguish between global and component-level fidelity, and apply fidelity data to improve both implementation quality and client outcomes. I will share examples of fidelity scoring methods, tools for assessing fidelity across repeated sessions, and ways to embed fidelity supports into training and supervision. Ethical considerations—including those related to informed consent, treatment validity, and stakeholder trust—will also be addressed. Finally, I will introduce emerging tools and approaches that can make fidelity measurement more sustainable, actionable, and aligned with the realities of everyday practice. Ultimately, the goal is to promote fidelity practices that are both rigorous and realistic, thereby enhancing the quality of services for autistic learners.

This session is designed for behavior analysts, psychologists, supervisors, and other professionals involved in designing, delivering, or overseeing autism services. It will also benefit educators, researchers, and practitioners seeking practical, research informed strategies for measuring and supporting procedural fidelity in real world settings. Both early career and experienced professionals will find value in this presentation.

Decades of research from basic and applied laboratories suggest that certain procedural arrangements or types of stimuli can produce responding under unintended sources of stimulus control. The behavior analyst’s detection of the incongruence between what is learned and what was intended to be learned often requires direct testing of what could be learned. It is paramount, then, that the behavior analyst “make sure that pupils see what they see” (Sidman, 2011, p. 986), which might be more effectively arranged by attempting to see (or even catch a glimpse) from our learners’ view. Fortunately, the tactics that define the behavior analytic approach, characteristic of both applied practice and basic research, provide a framework for this type of analysis for each learner. This presentation will describe the approach taken by our lab to improve our inferences of our learner’s view (i.e., propensity for certain stimulus control topographies) and to arrange interventions to ensure coherence of what is taught and what is learned.

This session is designed for behavior analysts, researchers, and practitioners who are engaged in skill acquisition programming and are interested in refining their understanding of stimulus control processes. It will be particularly valuable for professionals who design, implement, or evaluate instructional strategies and want to ensure that learning outcomes align with instructional goals. Graduate students, supervisors, and educators seeking to strengthen their ability to detect and address unintended sources of stimulus control in applied settings will also benefit. Attendees should have a foundational knowledge of behavior analytic concepts and a desire to deepen their application to learner-centered approaches.