Association for Behavior Analysis International

One method of growing the practice of applied behavior analysis is to train practitioners who are responsible for assessing and treating individuals engaging in challenging behavior. Practitioners from a variety of backgrounds (e.g., psychology, social work, education) are expected to assess and treat individuals engaging in challenging behavior, but they may not have the skills to conduct an experimental analysis, the gold standard in behavior assessment. Training these practitioners to use experimental analyses is necessary if there isnt someone else (e.g., BCBA) with the expertise readily available. Presenters in this symposium have chosen to expand ABA practice by training school-based and community-based practitioners to conduct behavior assessments. Three talks (Staubitz et al., Rios et al., Graber et al.) will discuss training models they employed to successfully teach practitioners preference assessments and/or experimental analyses. All three groups utilized telehealth technology in various ways to support their training. Carrion et al. studied the impact of training school-based behavior teams to conduct assessments that were traditionally reserved for a clinical setting has on clinical practices. Together, the four talks, serve as an example for the understanding the main benefit of sharing ABA with other disciplines: Creating ABA availability for those in need.

Even when practitioners understand the importance of function-based interventions for challenging behaviors, their skill and confidence deficits may prevent them from incorporating valid data within the Functional Behavioral Assessments (FBA) they are required to develop and implement. The Tennessee Department of Education contracted with board certified behavior analysts (BCBAs) from Vanderbilts Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD) to pilot a program training 8 school-based consultants (e.g. school psychology, special education) to improve the quality of their FBAs for students. TRIAD BCBAs conducted behavioral skills training using a combination of live and telepresence support to teach trainees how to plan, conduct, and analyze preference assessments and descriptive assessments, and to synthesize assessment results into a valid and complete FBA. This presentation will include data reflecting consistent, marked improvements in trainee knowledge and self-assessment of their skills over the course of the project, along with rising procedural fidelity, inter-observer agreement, and accuracy for assessments and reports generated. These findings suggest that these training procedures are likely to result in improved FBAs conducted by school-based consultants, and include several practical implications.

The Iowa Department of Education contracted behavior analysts from the Center for Disabilities and Development to provide hands-on training to behavior specialists working with students who display challenging behavior in schools. Training focused on preference assessments, concurrent operants assessments, antecedent analyses, and functional analyses. To date, this Challenging Behavior Service (CBS) has trained 33 individuals to an independent level in these skills. During training sessions, CBS trainers and trainees worked directly with students referred for challenging behavior. Based on operationalized levels of independence, trainees progressed through two phases of training: skill-building and maintenance. In skill-building, trainers modeled skills and gradually faded support as trainees showed increasing independence. In maintenance, trainees demonstrated their continued independence with the target skills. Over the course of the project, several challenges emerged, including student reactivity and high costs of travel for training. This presentation will describe how we utilized telehealth to overcome these challenges, including a case example from each phase of training. In skill-building, telehealth was used during a school-based assessment to reduce student reactivity, by allowing observers to take data from another classroom. In maintenance, telehealth was used to reduce costs associated with travel and to increase the validity of assessing trainee independence.