Association for Behavior Analysis International

The terms molar and molecular analysis have been used for several decades in experimental psychology and have changed definition and usage during this time. For example, Skinners operant conditioning was founded on a molecular behavior analysis in the 1930s. Yet, some contemporary models interpret operant behavior only at the molar level. The presentation will trace the history of the terms molar and molecular and articulate a need for inclusion of analyses at the level of individual response bouts, reinforcers, and stimuli in the 1-30 s range and define an analysis at this level as a molecular analysis. Illustrations will show how experimental manipulations can affect behavior at that level. Additional illustrations will demonstrate how behavior transitions during automated shaping relate to local reinforcing events. Besides, the presentation will outline novel ways on examining local dynamics of bouts of behavior that last a few seconds. The presentation will introduce the concept and method of conditional data analysis, which emphasizes collecting and analyzing data conditional on local events antecedent to response emission. The overall emphasis of the tutorial will be empirical rather than theoretical. Molecular analyses have critical interpretative implications for well-established findings in existing literature.

Graduate students and professionals

This presentation will focus on how a data-driven, research-based behavior analytic model of education is affecting the educational practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post war country in transition with the post-communist model of education. For over 30 years the Comprehensive Application of Behavior Analysis to Schooling or CABAS model schools have been serving students, parents and educators throughout the world and the research that comes out of those schools is continually advancing the science of Applied Behavior Analysis and Education. CABAS schools today serve students with and without disabilities and continue to promote high standards of educational practices and an overall scientific approach to teaching in the USA, England, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Spain. It is a comprehensive system of teaching as a science, that produces hundreds of experiments each year, disseminates the findings and applies the same across all classrooms it serves across the world. The CABAS model provided a modern, effective, evidence-based, and research-driven opportunity to help children in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and provided the evidence based pedagogy as a systematic solution to the education crisis in BiH. A Pilot Project with 2 classrooms and 20 children with developmental delays was started in 2010 and the first data suggest the Bosnian classrooms can successfully replicate the American outcomes. Twenty children, 10 educators, and 20 parents have directly benefited from teaching as science, and many more educators and students have benefited indirectly through lectures, consultations and observations of work with the target students. In 2011, 64 children were included in 7 classrooms, with a constant stream of new students arriving from the whole country. I will discuss the significance of applying the science of behavior to education in terms of how these data can affect the Bosnian education system and the successfulness of the evidence based pedagogy as a systematic solution to the education crisis in BiH. Also, I will share with you all the trials and tribulations of trying to start an education revolution one learn unit at the time!

The selection of an approach to help children with autism acquire communication is remarkably challenging. This talk will review many of the issues that relate to evidence-based practices which aim to improve broad language skills, including the acquisition of an array of verbal operants as well as skills associated with the listener (traditionally viewed as receptive skills). While the hallmark of applied behavior analysis involve many hundreds of single-subject designs looking at particular skills, many practitioners attempt to use packages- that is, an organization of target skills and teaching strategies, including those involving generalization. What is the evidence that particular packages work- either in terms of outcome measures or in comparison to other packages? Many other questions arise, including: Which skills should be targeted first? Is modality a critical issue? Is there evidence of successful transitioning from one modality to another and what guidelines should be used? Are there any non-behaviorally based strategies that are evidence-based? Rather than trying to provide a definitive answer to the Which strategy is universally the best? guidelines for the most appropriate questions to ask will be offered.

Joint attention was first described in the cognitive-developmental literature in the seventies, and descriptions of autism-specific deficiencies in joint attention skills started to appear in the late eighties. More than 20 years passed before publication of first behavioral intervention studies in that area. Although these studies apparently demonstrated that joint attention skills could be directly trained, follow-up measures indicated that the effects were quite transient. Contrived reinforcers used during training are not likely to follow behavior in the natural environment. An operant analysis of joint attention phenomena suggests that joint attention as displayed in typically developing children is established and maintained by generalized conditioned reinforcers such as others’ changing of gaze direction, nodding, smiling, commenting, etc. The presentation will discuss natural sources of joint attention phenomena and argue for the change of focus from the direct teaching of joint attention behavior to the sources of generalized conditioned reinforcers and the importance of arranging contingencies through which such reinforcers may acquire their function. Moreover, the presentation will discuss how joint attention phenomena seem to be directly interwoven with verbal behavior.