Transcript Module 1: ABA Basics, NET & Challenging Behaviors

Applied Behavior Analysis
Tutor Training:
Module 1 & 2
Tracy Vail, MS,CCC/SLP & Gabrielle Trapenberg, MA, BCBA
Let’s Talk Speech & Language Services Inc.
www.letstalksls.com
Ethics of ABA Practitioners
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Professionalism: Maintain professional
boundaries, be respectful of your families, and
coworkers.
Confidentiality: You are required to comply with
HIPAA regulations.
Social Validity: Behaviors should be targeted
that are socially relevant, so when working with
a client and his/her family you should always
take their needs into consideration.
Responsible conduct: a. Keep accurate and
consistent documentation. b. Only handle
situations you are trained to handle.
Module 1
What is Applied Behavior Analysis?
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Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the
science of behavior
Looks at human behaviors, what causes
them and how to make them increase or
decrease.
Analyze the function of behavior by looking
at the contingencies (what happens before
and after)
Module 1
What is Behavior?
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Anything that can be seen, felt and
counted by either an individual or others
in their environment.
Which of these are behaviors?
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Saying cookie
Thinking about cookie
Touching cookie
Dreaming about a
cookie
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Baking a cookie
Looking at a cookie
Reaching toward a
cookie
Module 1
Teaching Techniques
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Discrete Trial:
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Natural Environment Teaching:
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Breaking skills down and teaching it one sub-skill at a
time, providing prompts and reinforcement.
Helps promote generalization of skills in the natural
environment
Intensive Teaching at the Table
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Teaching in a one-on-one setting presenting skills in
discrete trials around and average VR.
Discrete Trial:
How we manipulate these contingencies determines
whether a behavior will increase or decrease.
Antecedent
MO/EO
&
Stimulus
(S-d or S-delta)
Behavior
Response
Consequence
Reinforcement
•Positive (soc med)
•Negative (soc med)
•Automatic (+ or -)
(Increases)
Punishment
•Positive
•Negative
(Decreases)
*Refer to Handout: “Terms & Definitions” and “Advanced Terminology”
Antecedent:
Establishing Operation
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Temporarily increases the value of the
reinforcer
Temporarily increases the behaviors that
have been consequated by that reinforcer in
the past
Example: If in the past, when I wanted
juice, I said “juice” and got it, then I’m more
likely to say juice again, when I want it.
Antecedent:
Establishing Operation
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Without motivation, you have no
reinforcer. Without a reinforcer, you
cannot increase behaviors.
Things that affect EO are:
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Satiation: if you’ve had constant access to the
reinforcer, then your EO decreases
Deprivation: if you haven’t had access to the
reinforcer in a while, then your EO increases
Consequences:
Reinforcement
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Increases the likelihood that a behavior
will occur again in the future
4 categories or “buckets” of behavior
based on the reinforcement history
Must be contingent!
Is not a “thing” but an effect on behavior
If a behavior is increasing, something is
reinforcing it.
Socially Mediated Reinforcement
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Socially mediated positive reinforcement:
behaviors that have a history of being
reinforced by getting things/attention from
people
Socially mediated negative reinforcement:
behaviors that been reinforced by escape
or delay of demands involving people
Automatic Reinforcement
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Automatic positive reinforcement (Stims):
behaviors that are reinforced because they
feel good
Automatic negative reinforcement:
behaviors I do because they remove a
“bad” or uncomfortable feeling
Expanding A Child’s
Community of Reinforcers
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How do you create new reinforcers?
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Pair or associate the new activity/item/person
with something the child already finds
reinforcing.
The new activity/item/person becomes a
“conditioned” reinforcer
Choose activities based on current targets,
the child’s MO or the child’s other
interests, age-appropriateness.
Expanding Interests
Pairing
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Learn what the child likes and be the
provider of “all good things.”
Build Motivation (MO)
Establish reinforcers
Play without requiring responding
Don’t remove the child from an enjoyable
activity, rather join him in the activity
Be animated and fun
Pair yourself and talking with reinforcement.
BE the Reinforcer!
Pair Sounds/Talking with Fun!
Pairing with Favorite Activities
Developing Play Patterns
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Build anticipation
Do the unexpected
Be animated
Be playful – play as children play
Pair words/sounds with what the child is
doing
Create verbal routines
Gradually change the routines and expand
the play patterns
Requiring Responses:
Do
Don’t
• Teach errorlessly
• Follow negative behavior with
• Fade in demands
• Teach to Fluency
• Prompt Quickly
• Fade prompts
reinforcement
• Remove a child from a reinforcing
activity to begin teaching
• Give directions to do things you
can’t prompt
• Make sure all questions have
answers
• Give directions without getting
compliance
• Find numerous reinforcers
• Kill reinforcers by placing too many
demands
• Reinforcer appropriate
behaviors
•Correct errors
• Have fun!
Requiring Responses:
Teaching Procedures
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Shaping – Gradually modify behavior into what we want it
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Prompting – Given assistance to provide correct
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to be.
responding. Includes visual cues, phsyical prompts, handover-hand, modeling, pointing
Fading – Critical in teaching children not to become
prompt dependent.
Chaining – Breaking skills down into units and teaching in
small units that are “chained” together (forward or
backward)
Differential Reinforcement – Reinforcing hard tasks
more heavily than easy tasks.
Shaping
Requiring Responses:
Transfer Procedures/Prompting
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Teach a new behavior by starting with a
behavior that you know the child can already do.
The child is more likely to repeat the same
behavior under a different condition
Once the behavior is taught under the new
condition, gradually fade the prompt
New learning is build on old learning
The learning remains “errorless”
Transfer Procedures
Correction Procedures
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Use whenever the child responds incorrectly
Give the SD + the response
Wait for the echoic
Repeat the SD
Wait for the response
Run a distractor trial (something the child can do
easily)
Repeat the SD
Challenging Behaviors
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Behaviors are maintained by reinforcement!
A new behavior (talking) won’t be used if the old
behavior (hitting) still works.
Negative behaviors must never be reinforced.
Consistency is important, because intermittent
reinforcement actually makes a behavior stronger!
Expect to see an extinction burst when you first
begin denying access to a reinforcer.
Challenging Behaviors:
ABC Data
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You must determine the function of a behavior
before determining how to respond
Look at what happened right before (antecedent)
and right after (consequence) the behavior
occurred
Once you have figured out the function of the
behavior choose a replacement behavior.
Put time between negative behavior and
prompting appropriate communication
Again, the negative behavior should never be
reinforced. It will get worse before it gets better
(extinction burst).
Verbal Behavior
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Verbal behavior (VB) focuses specifically
on behavior whose reinforcement is
mediated by a listener. It includes vocalverbal behavior, i.e. saying “water” to get
water) and non vocal-verbal behavior, i.e.
pointing to water to get water
Verbal Operants
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Mands- Asking for something. “I ask, I get.”
Receptives- I can follow directions, do what
others tell me to do
Tacts- I can label things in the environment
under a variety of conditions.
Imitation/Echoics- I can do/say what others
do/say.
Intraverbal- What I say is dependent upon what
others say but is not the same
Verbal Operants
Antecedent/Stimulus
Mand
Echoic
Motivation
“Say car”
Tact
Intraverbal
Car present
Behavior
Says “car”
Consequence
gets car
Says “car”
social/secondary
Says “car”
social/secondary
“We ride in the ..”Says “car” social/sec.
Manding
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Basis of all other verbal behavior
Teach by transferring from echoic or “fill-ins”
With and without items present
With and without someone asking “What do you
want?”
Single word, then variety of sentence forms
Manding for information
Manding for attention
Choosing Response Forms
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If child is non-vocal, must use an
alternative/augmentative system
Augmentative communication encourages rather
than discourages vocal productions
Experiment to determine how the child responds
to various forms
Picture/object exchange
Signs
Communication Boards
Vocal
Voice output devices
Manding with PECS
Manding with Signs
Imitation and Receptive
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Imitation:
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teach through physical prompting or anticipating
actions
Sd: Do this, try this, watch and try etc.
Gradually increase difficulty and complexity
Receptive:
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Teach by transfering from imitation or w/physical
prompts
Sd: varies (touch, find, show, where’s?)
Start with simple instructions, then increase
complexity
Tact and Intraverbal
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Tact:
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Teach by transfering from receptive, mand, fill-in,
intraverbal or echoic
Label objects, actions, parts, features, functions, classes
Sd can be just the items, “what’s this?” and must be varied
Verbal modules: teach the child to discriminate between
question forms
Intraverbal:
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Talking about things that are not present
Transfer from fill-in, tact or echoic
Begin with songs, rhymes, daily activities
Teach reversals
The start of conversation
Identifying Operants
Review of Verbal Operants
Operant
Antecedent
Behavior
Consequence
Mand
MO for item/activity Mand
Get item/activity
Receptive
Direction given
Engage in
Behavior
Generalized
reinforcement
Tact
Nonverbal stimulus
Verbal response
GR
Echoic
Verbal stimulus
Point-to-Point
response
Generalized
reinforcement
Imitation
Intraverbal
Action
PTP response
GR
Verbal stimulus
Response
GR or new VS
Textual Resp Written stimulus
Verbal response
GR
Transcription Verbal stimulus
Written response GR
Expanding NET Techniques
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While many of your targets may be taught at
the table, it is important to always continue
working on targets in the NET as natural
environment teaching has shown to increase
generalization of skills.
Always be careful when placing demands in the
NET that you do “kill the reinforcer” by allowing
too much access to the reinforcer (satiation) or
placing too many demands (aversive).
Expanding NET Techniques
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Teaching FFCs:
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FFC refers to feature, function and class.
Once a child has tacts and receptives in his
repertoire you can start teaching FFCs.
One of the best ways to teach FFCs is within
the context of the child’s daily activities.
More advanced skills also include
adjectives, prepositions and WH questions
NET Manding/Mands for Info
Teaching Social Skills
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When we consider who we choose to spend time and socialize with, it’s
generally people who are reinforcing to us.
One important part of teaching social skills is pairing people with
reinforcement. It is also important to consider that unsuccessful socialization
attempts may make other people aversive and increase self stimulatory
behaviors.
So what can we do?
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Modify: Make some modifications to avoid situations that may cause problem
behaviors.
Desensitize: Desensitization is used to teach a child to tolerate his environment
with as few modifications as possible.
Pair: Pairing with other children is often best done starting with one child and then
adding more children.
Request: Provide opportunities for the child to mand for his reinforcers from peers.
Social Cues: By paying attention to the social-emotional basis of communication we
can teach the child to share their experiences with others and learn about others
experiences, i.e. sharing affect, requesting and gaining (personal) information,
perspective taking and discriminating between fact and opinion.
Intensive Teaching
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Teaching in a one-on-one setting
presenting skills in discrete trials around
and average VR.
ITT (intensive table teaching) is used to
practice skills taught in the natural
environment and allows responses to
become fluent.
During NET manding is one of the top
priorities, during ITT the focus is primarily
on other skills.
Intensive Teaching
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Targets should be mixed and varied to make
sure the child is responding to the correct SD
Ratio: Always use a ratio of approximately 80%
mastered and 20% new.
Schedule of Reinforcement: initially when pairing
at the table or introducing a new target you may
use a fixed ratio (set number of responses),
however a variable ratio (variable number of
responses set around an average) is
recommended because it produces a steady rate
of responding.
Intensive Teaching:
Transfer Procedures
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Transfer trial- Use the mastered skill to
evoke the desired behavior then present
the new SD to get the same behavior.
Disractor trial(s)- Present a mastered task
or two
Independent trial- Re-present the new SD
to evoke the behavior and reinforce
correct response heavily
Intensive Teaching:
Correction Procedures
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Use whenever the child responds incorrectly
Give the SD + the response
Wait for the echoic
Repeat the SD
Wait for the response
Run a distractor trial (something the child can do easily)
Repeat the SD
In general if you do not get an independent response
after 3 attempts, accept the prompted response and
move on. We will most likely have to re-asses the target
or teaching procedure.
Intensive Teaching
Data Collection
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It is important to keep data of targeted
and mastered skills, so:
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We can accurately and effectively track
progress
We can build on and expand to new skills
using mastered skills
We can always have a record of what we are
working on
ALL decisions made in programs based on
ABA are data-driven and objective
Data Collection
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Program Board: Used to document targeted skills.
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For NET: record targets taught within the child’s
activities. Transfer between operants, i.e. from mand
to tact, from receptive to tact, from tact to
intraverbal.
For ITT: It is recommended to choose 2-3 targets for
each skill at a time. Targets should be probed and
taught following the specified teaching procedures.
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Probe data should be recorded with a + or – (I or P).
If necessary teaching data can be collected with tallies
or a T or N (if taught at the table or in the NET)
Data Collection
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Probe: An easy way to collect data is through probes. A
probe is collected the first time the target is presented
that day. The probe shows us whether or not the child
can accurately and fluently provide the required
response without prompts.
Teaching: We may occasionally also keep track of how
often an item is taught throughout a session to ensure
that the item is being targeted frequently enough
Mastery criteria: is typically based on the child’s
learning history and often ranges between 2-4
consecutive independent responses.