Reassuring Children about School Safety

It is difficult to shield our children from incessant media coverage increasing their risk of experiencing secondary trauma. Our data-streaming world assures that our kids are well-aware of the most recent school shooting incident. So, how can…

Motivating Operations

An establishing operation (EO) is a motivating operation that increases the value of a reinforcer and increase the frequency in behavior that provides access to the reinforcer (Cooper, Heron & Heward, 207, p. 695).  An example of  an EO…

Group Contingency

A group contingency is a behavior management protocol where a single consequence (it can be a reward or aversive) is given based on either the behavior of an individual in a group, the behavior of a particular set of people within the group…

Don Baer

Don Baer is one of the "fathers of generalization."  In 1999, he wrote: "Learning one aspect of anything never means that you know the rest of it.  Doing something skillfully now never means that you will always do it well.  Resisting one…

Instructional Design that Promotes Generalization

Multiple exemplar training: A teaching style, for the benefit of generalization, uses a variety of stimulus and response outcomes.  For example, teaching a child to say, "hello" and / or wave to the stimulus of both to someone waving hello…

Contingencies

A contingency can be either a reinforcement or punishment that occurs after a behavior has been expressed by an individual or group.  A naturally existing contingency, in layman's terms, "natural consequence" happens without the manipulation…

Generalization

Baer, Wolf, and Risely (1968) included "generality of behavior change" as one of their 7 dimensions of applied behavior analysis.  Generalization of behavior change occurs when that behavior occurs outside of the learning environment.  Generalization…
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Sticking to Your New Year’s Goals

The New Year is upon us and along with it linger our New Year’s resolutions. Have you already considered discarding your goals this year due to lack of progress? Maybe you haven’t even set any yet because they haven't worked in the past.…
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Schedules of Reinforcement

A schedule of reinforcement is a rule that describes how often the occurrence a behavior will receive a reinforcement.  On the two ends of the spectrum of schedules of reinforcement there is continuous reinforcement (CRF) and extinction (EXT). Continuous…

Reinforcement 101

The concept of reinforcement is one of the most important and utilized principles in applied behavior analysis.  The most basic definition of reinforcement is that a type of behavior (R) is followed by a reinforcement (S^R) there will be an…