Association for Behavior Analysis International

Functional communication training (FCT) involves introducing reinforcements for appropriate or desired communicative responses in lieu of existing challenging behavior(s). Identified as an evidence-based practice, FCT can be applied across multiple populations of students (e.g., autism, intellectual disabilities). Despite the laudable successes and extensive research support, FCT can be impractical or ineffective in schools, clinics or home settings if utilized with students who are from culturally, linguistically, or economically diverse backgrounds, and these cultural considerations are not included through all intervention stages. There is an identified need to develop an awareness and provide culturally responsive practices across the field of education. Participants will learn the impact of culture on behaviors in the home, school, and clinical settings, including implications for the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts. We present ethical obligations for culturally responsive practices, as well as framework, strategies and four detailed steps for implementing culturally responsive functional communication training when addressing challenging behaviors.

Students often complain about the amount of time it takes to do all the assigned tasks in different academic areas, both in high school and college. Increasing the amount of time spent studying, what is usually called "concentration," could help students make studying more efficient and effective. Self-management has been shown to be a useful approach to improving on-task behavior and, consequently, academic engagement of students with disabilities. This procedure involves teaching the individual various behaviors, such as self-assessment, self-correction, goal-setting, self-registration, and self-monitoring. There is a gap in the literature investigating the usefulness of self-monitoring for adolescents and adults in the typical population. In this study, a self-management procedure is applied to help a college student increase on-task behavior while studying. A changing criteria design was used to assess internal validity. The total study time increased from an average of 10 minutes to 190 minutes.

The purpose of this study was to compare the differential effects of mobile assistive technology (AT) loaded with visual activity schedules (VAS; pictures alone) compared to video activity schedules (VidAS; pictures linked to video models) to promote vocational independence and decreased reliance on adult supports for adolescents and adults with intellectual disability, with and without autism. Seven single-case multitreatment designs were used to assess differential effects between the two interventions when participants completed various vocational tasks. All participants were able to perform some of the task steps independently with both VAS and VidAS but demonstrated a greater increase in independence with self-instruction using VidAS than when only given VAS. Results suggest that incorporating VidAS into mobile AT can increase independence while decreasing reliance on additional adult support, suggesting that this could be a reasonable accommodation in school, work, and community settings.

This poster presents the result of a behavioral intervention aimed at improving reading and writing skills in students at a public school in Brazil. Thirty elementary school students (3rd to 5th grade) were exposed to the teaching procedures. The intervention used two of the four programmed units of a computerized teaching program previously developed by de Souza et al. (2009). These two units taught 27 of the 51 stimulus-stimulus relations from the complete program. The main tasks were conditional discrimination trials aimed to establish conditional relations between dictated words, pictures, and printed words. Furthermore, some trials were designed to establish conditional relations between written and dictated syllables. Two tasks, not directly taught, were used to assess the students’ repertoire, using a pre-test x post-test format: a) textual behavior and b) writing under dictation (Constructed Response Matching-to-Sample). The tests presented the words used in training plus a sample of novel words (to assess recombinative generalization). The comparison of the average percentage of correct responses in pre and post-test for each grade indicates an improvement in the reading and writing skills. Applications on a larger scale are recommended.

Functional communication training (FCT) is a well-established, evidence-based practice used to address challenging behavior among individuals across settings, ages, and disability categories. However, the research is limited on the implementation of FCT in inclusive school settings for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The purpose of this review was to summarize FCT intervention studies implemented in inclusive K-12 school settings for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We synthesized studies to summarize study characteristics, quality, and intervention effectiveness. Our findings suggest that FCT was most often implemented as part of a multi-component intervention package and delivered by educational team members. Further, the quality of most studies was either acceptable or strong. The overall effect size estimate for primary dependent measures as measured by Tau-U ranged from moderate to strong. We present implications for practice specific to educational teams that support the behavioral needs of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities in inclusive settings and offer avenues for future research.

Gamification of education continues to experience a growth in applications and use. In the field of Behavior Analysis, gamification, specifically video gamification, of behavior analytic interventions remains an understudied but auspicious area of growth. Morford et al. (2014) outlined the intersection between behavior analysis and game design, noting the use of behavior analytic principles that appear in game design and operationally defining characteristics of game-playing. In addition, they provided a call to action wherein behavior analysts should study and pursue avenues of integrating behavior analysis into game design. The purpose of this poster is to demonstrate early stages of introducing simple behavioral interventions to change behavior into video games. Creation of games has come from a partnership of a service providing agency, StepOne Neurodiversity Services, and an established transformational game production company, Simcoach Games. This poster describes the efforts of the behavior analyst to disseminate applied behavior analysis to the Simcoach Games team and working with game design experts to produce prototype video games to be deployed as tools in a clinic and special education setting. In addition, future research on these video games in vivo settings is described.