Association for Behavior Analysis International

Increasingly, distance learning technology is opening university (and other) doors to a much larger audience. With a modern computer and an internet connection, employees, parents, indeed anyone who has limited access to, or interest in, traditional campus-based options, can conveniently participate in an increasing range of coursework. As teachers of behavior analysis, we can now reach a greatly expanded demographic base. Such is the case with Behavioral Intervention in Autism (BIA), a four-course distance learning curriculum designed to reach and educate a large number of parents and personnel in the application of behavioral intervention with children with autism. A large team of behavior analysts have collaborated to develop and evaluate this curriculum, with generous support from autism and instructional design experts outside of our team. In this tutorial, I have the pleasure of sharing our work on BIA as the illustrative case in support of two purposes: 1) to describe and present data on how distance learning can be used with professional integrity to educate a greatly expanded number of parents and personnel seeking to master behavioral intervention, and 2) to illustrate how behavior analytic instructional pedagogy can be meshed with current and emerging technologies to produce highly effective distance learning courses.

The purpose of this presentation is to describe how systems of behavior support can be established and maintained at the school, district, and state levels. The steps, resources, and content of efforts to build local behavior support capacity and systems will be described. Examples of activities and structures that support efforts related to action planning, team leadership coordination, coaching and facilitation, training capacity, and evaluation also will be described.

Although interest and concern with the behavioral effects of drugs can be traced back some 25 centuries to Homers 500 BC reference in The Odyssey to the effects of alcohol and opium, the emergence of behavioral pharmacology as a scientific discipline has very much paralleled the basic and applied development of behavior analysis over the past half century. The best way to track the development of a scientific field is through the academic research centers that are the source of its trained professionals and it is in this important regard that both the methodological and substantive contributions of B. F. Skinner are most noteworthy. There were of course a number of seminal events as well as somewhat fortuitous circumstances that shaped the discipline in strange and wonderful ways, but the influence of substance abuse with its myriad basic and applied permutations cannot be underestimated. The generous support provided of late for both drug abuse research and treatment has greatly enhanced the opportunities for advancing both experimental and applied behavior analysis. As in all of our behavior analytic endeavors however, the field of behavioral pharmacology faces its greatest challenges in the transition from the controlled confines of the experimental laboratory to an endemic substance abuse natural ecology.

Social change agents must deal with behavior as it occurs in everyday environments. The principles that account for human behavior may be simple, but the particular behavior-environment relations that characterize human repertoires are very complex. Of particular importance for humans is the role of the social environment, i.e., the behavior of other people. Because operant behavior is behavior that operates on the environment, it may alter the environment of others as well as produce consequences for the behaver herself. When many people behave similarly due to similarity in the reinforcement contingencies, the similar behaviors are designated a cultural practice. The aggregate effect of those similar behaviors may be a changed environment for many other people. The relation between the behavior constituting a cultural practice and the aggregate change in the environment of others has been called a macrocontingency. Cultural change can be accomplished by system-wide altering of the environment that supports the practice, for example by changes in law or dissemination of medical or environmental information. Individual behavior plays a different role when it participates in a metacontingecy: repetitions of interlocking operant contingencies that produce outcomes that can be repeated only if the contingencies remain interlocked. Cultural intervention in metacontingencies requires identifying and altering those elements of the interlocking contingencies that are affecting the cumulative outcomes while maintaining the integrity and continuation of the interlocking operant contingencies.