The 2nd Inaugural Conference was hosted by the Department of Behavior Analysis at Simmons College. We wish to thank the Gildea Family Foundation for the generous donation to help support our first conference.
Our annual conference is designed to provide Board Certified Behavior Analysts, Board Certified Assistant Behavior Analysts, and graduate students the opportunity to learn about applied and theoretical issues relevant to their work as behavior analysts. Speakers will include leaders in the field of applied behavior analysis and academia. For the 2009 conference, speakers included Dr. Judah Axe, Dr. Michael Cameron, Dr. Ted Carr, Dr. David Palmer, and Dr. Julie Vargas.
Simmons College is an Acceptable Continuing Education (ACE) provider and will offer continuing education (CE) units to conference participants.
Judah B. Axe, Ph.D., BCBA
Matrix Training of Instruction Following of Pre-Academic Skills with Preschoolers with
Autism
Matrix training is a generative approach to instruction as some skills are directly taught and others
emerge without direct teaching. Four preschoolers with autism were taught to follow instructions to perform
actions with pictures (e.g., circle the pepper, underline the deer). Six actions and six pictures were each
arranged on the axes of matrices. Most-to-least prompting was used to teach the instructions along the
diagonals of the matrices. A multiple probe across behaviors design was employed. Following direct teaching
of the six instructions along the diagonals of the matrices, two participants followed 30 untaught
instructions. Two participants required teaching on more than the minimal number of instructions to
demonstrate generalization to untaught instructions. Three of the four participants followed instructions
to perform the actions with previously known pictures, letters, and numbers. Matrix training can be used to
efficiently teach language and academic skills to children with autism.
Michael Cameron, Ph.D., BCBA and Leslie Morrison, Ph.D.,
(Candidate)
The Effects of Concept Mapping on the Intraverbal and Elaboration Performances of Graduate
Students
Although researchers and professionals agree that critical thinking is a necessary skill in higher
education, there is little agreement as to what actual processes are involved and what methods are best for
teaching behaviors associated with critical thinking. Williams and Worth (2001) stated that although the
literature presents many suggestions on how to promote critical thinking, there is limited empirical
evidence on the effectiveness of specific strategies. In addition, the literature also seems to focus
primarily on ways to assess and measure critical thinking skills using indirect methods of data collection
that target mentalistic descriptions of critical thinking, which further make it difficult to fully
understand the processes involved in the development of behaviors associated with critical thinking, such
as the ability to elaborate on previously learned information, and intraverbal behavior.
The purpose of this study was to teach graduate students to elaborate on important concepts in behavior analysis (conditioned motivating operations, or CMOs) by creating concept maps as textual prompts to advance them through each level of learning in Bloom's taxonomy. Theoretical and applied issues will be discussed within the presentation.
Ted Carr, Ph.D.
A Context-Based Approach for Understanding and Treating
Problem Behavior
Problem contexts produce problem behavior. Such behavior causes the greatest grief for educators and
constitutes one of the most serious impediments to learning. Context is defined by a combination of
discriminative stimuli and setting events. Effective support begins by identifying (assessing) contextual
variables related to three generic categories: activities/routines, social factors, biological factors.
Assessment information leads logically to a tripartite model of treatment: avoid, mitigate, cope.
Specifically, one can, when appropriate, rearrange the environment to avoid problematic contexts. Or, one
can alter the stimulus properties of such contexts (mitigation) so that they no longer evoke problem
behavior. Or, one can teach skills that help the individual to cope with the context, thereby undermining
the necessity for display of problem behavior. Traditional educational approaches focus on "problem
children" and "problem behavior." This approach, in contrast, places the focus on "problem contexts,"
leading logically to a twin emphasis on environmental redesign and skill development.
David Palmer, Ph.D.
The Role of Prosody in the Stimulus Control of Verbal Behavior
Autoclitic frames consist of fixed elements, intraverbally related, and variable terms that must be
supplied by context. For example, the utterance, "I called the doctor up," includes the frame "call X up"
and the variable term "doctor." In another context, the variable term might be "my mother-in-law" or "the
refrigerator repairman." The interruption of an intraverbal sequence by a variable term raises the question
of what discriminative stimuli in the context control the shift from one verbal operant to another, that
is, from the frame to variable to frame again. I argue that the only invariant features of the context are
prosodic cues within the utterance itself, and that among the many functions that prosody might serve in
verbal behavior, the control of a speaker by prosodic cues within his own utterances is among the most
important. Children with autism often have atypical prosody. If the foregoing remarks are correct, such
children should show impairments in grammar, and remediating the deficit might produce unexpected jumps in
verbal performance.
Julie Vargas, Ph.D.
From Science to Educational Technology: Where are we now?
This presentation describes the distinctive features of the science responsible for the birth of behavior
analysis and looks at where they are found in current behavioral programs in education. One of Skinner's
main contributions was probability of behavior, measured in frequency or rate of responding. Rate is a
central component of Precision Teaching but it is missing in trial formats such as Discrete Trial. Shaping
and the use of precise contingencies via conditioned reinforcers is at the heart of TAG teaching, but
lacking in other technologies. The analysis of verbal behavior has provided effective tools for teaching
language skills and has relevance outside of the field of autism. Examples will be given of various
procedures, along with ways to incorporate additional features into existing technologies to make them more
effective.
For additional questions, please contact Nancy Ortega at nancy.ortega@simmons.edu.
