Behavioral Interventions最新文献

Johnston, Pennypacker, and Green's Strategies and Tactics of Behavioral Research and Practice (4th edition) is an updated edition of a classic behavior analytic research methods text. In this review, we describe the organization, features, and content of the fourth edition. We also offer some suggestions for instructors considering using the text. We conclude by noting that the fourth edition of Strategies and Tactics of Behavioral Research and Practice is an excellent choice for a behavior analytic class in research methods, single case design, or measurement. With an enhanced focus on practice, this edition is also a great resource for clinicians when evaluating the effects of their interventions.

Special education teachers are asked to deliver high-quality instruction with compassion and care. Emerging literature suggests that the skills of “behavioral artistry” are socially valid among caregivers of children with developmental disabilities, but the training of these skills in teachers has yet to be developed and evaluated. This study extended work by Bukszpan et al. (2023, https://doi.org/10.1002/bin.1963) by assessing the effectiveness of the teaching interaction procedure (TIP) in training skills of behavioral artistry to six special education teachers. The results demonstrated that skills of behavioral artistry could be taught and maintained through the utilization of TIP, which extended previous research on this topic. Further, assessments of social validity rated the intervention and dependent variable highly favorable among participants as well as caretakers of school age children.

A choice paradigm was used to examine food stealing across options with and without social consequences for 18 primarily autistic children. Ten children stole from the option lacking social consequences suggesting automatic reinforcement. Six children stole from both options suggesting multiple control. One child stole exclusively from the option that produced access to attention suggesting social reinforcement, and one child refrained from stealing. Overall, stealing maintained without social consequences for 16 of 17 (94.1%) children. In eight cases, stealing either failed to maintain or never occurred when the social contingency was examined in isolation. Our results suggest that children's food stealing may largely be automatically reinforced. Analysis and discussion of interpretational errors in concurrent operant and single schedule arrangements is provided, along with recommendations for error mitigation.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often present with substantial delays in the development of play skills, requiring intensive intervention. Several literature reviews have explored various strategies to teach play skills. They recommend teaching play in a variety of contexts to include natural settings and peer interactions to enhance generalization. Naturalistic components of play instruction may include natural settings (e.g., home, school play area), natural change agents (e.g., peers, parents), and salient environmental stimuli (e.g., common toys, siblings, peers). Given the complexity of these variables and their impact on the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of play skills, a scoping review can help organize the literature for clinicians and researchers. Therefore, the purpose of this scoping review was to investigate interventions aimed at teaching toy play to children with ASD and to examine the naturalistic components included in these interventions. We aimed to (a) provide an overview of the current literature on teaching toy play to children with ASD, (b) summarize the naturalistic components of the interventions reviewed, (c) offer suggestions to guide clinicians in teaching toy play skills, and (d) present considerations for future research directions in this area.

Determining the precise number of therapy hours a patient needs is a critical clinical decision. Too few hours can reduce overall progress and likely keeps the individual in treatment longer than necessary. Too many hours can cause the individual to spend unnecessary time and money they could have spent on other activities that increase their happiness and well-being. Too many hours also can reduce the hours the provider has available to see other clients further exacerbating access issues prominent in mental health today. Despite its importance, little research exists to show how specific patient profiles and intake assessments can lead to replicable and precise therapeutic recommendations. In this study, we show how patient clustering algorithms can be combined with predictive modeling to create a data-driven, algorithmic system that generates dose-response curves relating hours per week of therapy to patient progress, while considering the patient's unique profile. Specifically, we used 48 variables spanning hours and characteristics of therapy, treatment goal characteristics, and patient characteristics to predict goals mastered for 39,475 individuals with ASD receiving applied behavior analysis (ABA) services from 833 service providers. Unsupervised machine learning identified 18 distinct patient clusters. Across clusters, top performing regression models predicted patient progress for all patients with r² = 0.97 and MAE = 0.003 and with r² for individual clusters ranging between 0.95 and 0.99 (∼0.20–0.24 points higher than past research) and MAE ranging between < 0.001 and 0.25. Once designed, the resulting patient-specific dose-response curves can be used to identify the optimal hours of week that maximizes progress while reducing unnecessary time in treatment. Though designed specifically for predicting ABA hours for individuals with ASD, the current method offers an adaptable data-driven, algorithmic approach to determine the hours of therapy that optimize patient progress.

With the widespread use of electronic recording applications in healthcare, and recently in applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy sessions that teach autistic learners, researchers have begun examining how the recording instruments influence the behavior of the clinicians who use them. Although prior research has suggested that electronic recording consumes more of the behavior technician's time than pen-and-paper recording, it is unclear how this impacts the overall flow of ABA sessions. The present study examined (a) the rate of teaching trials that behavior technicians presented and (b) the percentage of learning trials that the behavior technicians inputted data for as a function of two electronic recording instruments and pen-and-paper recording. The findings suggested that the recording instrument did not impact either of these measures. However, the participants ranked electronic recording more favorably than pen-and-paper recording. Given the present results and prior research, electronic recording does not seem to pose practical or clinical disadvantages over pen-and-paper recording.

Kicking is an important fundamental motor skill that is seldom studied. Young children who can kick with competence have opportunities to increase their physical activity and engage in social interactions. We examined the effects of developmentally aligned kicking instruction taught to five children (7–8 years old) with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A multiple baseline design across participants was used to examine the effects of developmentally aligned kicking instruction. The primary dependent measure was percentage of correct kicking trials and this was supplemented by two outcome measures, (a) the TGMD-2 kicking subtest score and (b) the kicking developmental sequence, which were measured at pretest, the end of baseline, post-intervention, and 3 weeks following intervention. All five participants improved their kicking performance, demonstrating that the intervention was an effective strategy for learning kicking skills for children with ASD.

There is limited behavior analytic research evaluating the impact of teaching in both the familial and culturally dominant languages in bilingual children with autism. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of instructional sequences and language preference on the rate of acquisition of a receptive identification task targeting English and Spanish nouns with three Spanish-English bilingual children with autism. An adapted alternating treatments design was employed to compare three instructional sequences: (1) English-Spanish, (2) Spanish-English, and (3) mixed. Results for one participant demonstrated the mixed language training sequence to be the most efficient training sequence, while the Spanish-English sequence was most efficient for the other two participants. Language preference did not appear to impact learning. The results of this study are discussed in terms of the Naming Theory (Horne and Lowe 1996), and providing culturally responsive care to bilingual learners with autism.