Assignment Details

Complete this week’s Learning Activity to prepare for the assignment.

For this assignment, you are a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who has been consulting with six school districts in your state. You have provided guidance to school psychologists and have conducted Functional Behavior Assessments (FBAs) and made recommendations to Individualized Education Program (IEP) teams regarding academic and behavior goals.

Recently, your state school board contacted you to thank you for the work you have been doing in the schools and to ask a favor. The members of the state school board recently read a peer reviewed research article about the efficacy of training school teachers to conduct FBAs. The paper was convincing, and the Board would like you to conduct training not only in how to conduct a FBA but also how to implement some basic behavior acquisition and reduction programs based on applied behavior analysis (ABA) principles. You agreed to conduct a two-day workshop and begin preparations for the intensive training.

Create a 10-12 slide narrated PowerPoint Presentation to include the following:

• Explain why identifying function is so important to successful behavior intervention programs.
  • Base this on your Unit 9 reading assignment and present facts supporting the value of conducting Functional Behavior Assessments (FBAs) in the public-school system and why it is important that teachers have the skills needed to conduct them.
    1. To illustrate the importance of identifying the function of a target behavior before implementing a behavior intervention plan (BIP), provide an example of a target behavior that is being inadvertently reinforced because the function of the behavior has not been identified.
• Discuss the two components of the FBA, i.e., the Indirect Assessment and the Direct Descriptive Assessment, and explain how they are carried out. Include the following in your discussion:
  1. Describe two Indirect Assessment approaches/tools.
  2. Describe two Direct Descriptive Assessment approaches/tools.
  3. Detail how the probable function of a target behavior can be hypothesized based upon the results of the FBA.
     1. Define the two broad categories of behavior function.
• Acquisition Programs: Shaping and Chaining
  1. Define Shaping and Chaining (Include the three types of chaining procedures in your discussion.)
  2. Create a simple scenario in which a complex behavior can be broken down and trained using one of the chaining methods. Create a task analysis to illustrate the concept.
     1. Using one of the components in the task analysis used for your chaining example, demonstrate how shaping can be used to train that one component.

• Reduction Programs: Differential Reinforcement
  1. Describe the methods of Differential Reinforcement of Alternative (DRA) behavior; Differential Reinforcement of Other (DRO) behavior; and Differential Reinforcement of Incompatible (DRI) behavior.
     1. Create a scenario in which you illustrate the use of one of the Differential Reinforcement approaches (DRA; DRO; DRI).

• Generalization and Maintenance
  1. Define generalization and maintenance.
  2. Explain the importance of programming for generalization and maintenance.
  3. Present three techniques that can be used to “program” for generalization.

Directions: Your PowerPoint Presentation should incorporate narration, as indicated, and you should transcribe your narration in the “Notes” section of the slides. Your presentation should be between 10-12 slides in length, not including the title and reference slides. You should apply APA Style formatting throughout your presentation as applicable.

You should use only the sources contained in the course for this assignment.

Reading and Resources

Read the following:

Young, A., Andrews, C., Hayes, C., & Valdez, C. (2018). Should teachers learn how to formally assess behavior? Three educators’ perspectives. Education, 138, 291-300.

TEXTBOOKS

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., Heward, W. L. (2019). Applied Behavior Analysis.