2Introductionehavior analysts who practice in schools, private homes, and other community settings have a daunting task. They must keep abreast of current findings in our field and disseminate effective interventions while working with professionals, parents, and other caregivers who often have limited experience and training in behavior analysis. The overriding mission of Behavior Analysis in Practice is to assist practitioners with these endeavors. Articles describing best practices, reviews of the literature on emerging and established interventions, commentaries on key issues that impact practice, and evaluations of procedures that we can readily employ in naturalistic settings may help bridge the gap between science and practice. The articles appearing in this issue of BAP educate, inform, and offer solutions to our most pressing problems. Tribute to a Pioneer
Leading this issue is a tribute to one of the field’s founders, Dr. Sidney W. Biou. The death of Dr. Bijou on June 11, 2009, at the age of 100, provided an occasion to reflect on his long-
standing contributions to the field, many of which established the foundation of current best practices. A number of obituaries describing his life and work have been published (or will soon be published) in such outlets as the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis , The Behavior Analyst , and The American Psychologist, among others. In lieu of soliciting another formal obituary, I invited students of behavior analysis to exhaustively examine Dr. Bijou’s work, identify two or three studies that they felt had the greatest impact on practices used today, and describe this work for those who may not be directly familiar with it. Amber E. Mendres and Michelle A. Frank-Crawford, doctoral students at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, eagerly accepted my invitation. The three studies that they highlighted in the article, “A T ribute to Sidney W. Bijou, Pioneer in Behavior Analysis and Child Development: Key Works that Have T ransformed Behavior Analysis in Practice,” were well chosen. The impact of these studies on the field are clearly illustrated in the interventions and approaches appearing in this issue of BAP.
Strategies for Successful Dissemination
The three empirical articles in this issue focus on practical approaches for assisting the greatest number of clients. The use of standardized, or “manualized,” interventions that provide teachers and caregivers with a readily accessible way to change the behavior of many children is one strategy for promoting wide-spread dissemination of effective treatments. “First Step to Success,” designed for young children who enter school at risk for failure, is a standardized intervention based on differential reinforcement and extinction. It is appropriate for children who engage in attention-maintained problem behavior. In “A Preliminary Analysis of the Effects of Coaching Feedback on Teacher Implementation Fidelity of First Step to Success ,” Rodriguez and colleagues evaluated a relatively simple strategy for improving the integrity with which public school teachers implemented this intervention. Results were consistent with previous research, showing that performance feedback can be critical for maintaining treatment integrity.
Jessica Frieder and her colleagues took advantage of web-based technology to offer individualized assessment and intervention services to clients living in remote locations. In this demonstration project, behavior analysts affiliated with a university coached school personnel via the Internet while the personnel conducted a functional analysis and developed a treatment for a child who engaged in severe problem behavior. This pilot project, described in their paper, “Teleconsultation in School Settings: Linking Classroom Teachers and Behavior Analysts Through Web-Based Technology,” has the potential to make behavior analytic services more broadly available to those who need them. Finally, Lattimore and colleagues evaluated a simple strategy for promoting independence that behavior analysts could readily teach to staff, teachers, or caregivers who accompany individuals with disabilities in community settings. The intervention, called “SWAT Support,” is a type of embedded teaching approach that involves three-step prompting and praise. Results of their evaluation, described in the paper, “Increasing Independence of Adults with Autism in Community Activities: A Brief, Embedded Teaching Strategy,” showed that staff with and without prior relevant experience required only about 15 min of training to successfully implement SWAT Support with adults at work and at a store. As a result, the adults began to independently perform activities (e.g., put items in a shopping cart; obtain supplies from a secretary) that had been previously completed by support staff. A Tutorial on the Motivating Operation
Behavior analysts who have a firm grasp of conceptual systems may be better equipped to identify functional relations and develop effective interventions for clients. In the first-ever tutorial published in BAP, Paul Langthorne tackles an incredibly important concept that is often overlooked in descriptive analyses of behavior. In “A T utorial on the Concept of the Motivating Operation and its Importance to Application,” Langthorne focuses in particular on the less An Introduction to the Volume 2, Number 2 of Behavior Analysis in Practice (BAP)
Dorothea C. Lerman, Ph.D., BCBA-D – Editor, BAP
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