Editorial: Introduction to Special Issue on Thinking and Behavior

For this special issue of the Behavior Analyst Today (BAT), invitations were sent out to various behavioral listservs to recruit articles related to behavior analysis and thinking. I pitched this idea to then co-Lead Editors Tom Zane and Mary Jane Weiss when I was an associate editor for BAT. They enthusiastically supported this idea, and it seemed like an ideal transition for the issue as I took the helm as incoming Lead Editor. It seems that "thinking" is often discussed in teaching behavior analysis, but not something that we often take the time to write about in these terms. As I have written previously, thinking about the ways in which thinking can be assessed and shaped is important (Crone-Todd, 2007). As we received manuscript submissions for consideration, I was struck by the care and thought given to written about thinking from a behavioral perspective. As we know, Skinner (1957) devoted a chapter to thinking in Verbal Behavior; however, it remains one of those topics that is not well represented in our field Since behaviorism takes a physically monist position with respect to mental and physical behavior, the processes involved in private thinking, reasoning, feeling, and other private experiences are considered to be controlled by the same respondent and operant principles and procedures as our public behaviors. However, as Skinner and others have pointed out, scientifically studying our private events is very difficult: They are indeed only truly observable to one individual. This fact makes procedural reliability methods commonly used in our field, such as inter-observer reliability, impossible to carry out. Despite this difficulty, it is also the case that behaviorists study the outcomes of behavior. Under different conditions, we study whether or not students are likely to produce different products of thinking behavior. In Education, these products might include test scores on exams, or some assessment of the quality of their papers or other written work. In this issue, the contributing authors offer a variety of ways in which thinking can be studied as a product of behavior. The first three inter-related articles are based on the work of T.V. Joe Layng, Melinda Sota, and Marta Leon, who have been studying text comprehension. In the first article (Layng, Sota, & Leon, 2011), reading comprehension is discussed in terms of two different repertoires: verbal and investigative. This approach will be of general interest to readers in terms of how to look at complex human behavior, and is a good introduction to the foundation for this work at Headsprout. The second article (Sota, Leon, & Layng, 2011) covers content analysis of the products of the complex set of verbal and investigative repertoires. There is also a call to assessment at the beginning of instruction so that those who are teaching text comprehension can start where the student is at, and thereby are more likely to shape the complex repertoires involved. In the third article (Leon, Layng, & Sota, 2011), the synthesis of how to program, and expand, the repertoires is presented. The emphasis on setting up the conditions for successful learning should not escape readers from the behavioral perspective. The fourth article, by Louis Svenningsen and Joseph Pear (2011), describes two experiments in which the computer-aided personalized system of instruction (CAPSI) is shown as effective in teaching critical thinking skills to university-level students This use of a PSI course to teach critical thinking is important, since behavioral approaches to teaching are often criticized for only purportedly teaching lower-order skills. …