Multitreatment designs were used to evaluate the relative effectiveness of multicomponent Stay, Play, Talk (SPT) interventions on peer social behaviors for two groups of children, each including one Participant With Autism Spectrum Disorder (PWA) and two socially competent peers. Children were trained to use buddy strategies during 5-min free-play…

Group contingencies are recognized as a potent intervention for addressing challenging student behavior in the classroom, with research reviews supporting the use of this intervention platform going back more than four decades. Over this time period, the field of education has increasingly emphasized the role of research evidence for informing…

Group-oriented contingencies are arranged to target the behavior of a group of people simultaneously. Overall, group-oriented contingencies have been shown to be effective in both decreasing problem behavior and increasing appropriate behavior. However, results are mixed regarding which type(s) of group-oriented contingency is most effective for…

Greenfield's subjectivist approach to the construction and interpretation of social reality is examined and applied to school organizations in an attempt to demonstrate that such organizations may be advantageously viewed as entities constructed and sustained by ideas in people's minds. The path to understanding schools and their administration…

Interventions based on functional analyses may result in better treatment outcomes than those using arbitrary reinforcers. However, functional analyses may be impractical in some situations, or an immediate intervention may be necessary while a functional analysis is being conducted. In these situations, delivering the social reinforcers most…

Academic engagement has been shown to decline as students progress through elementary and middle school, reaching the lowest levels in high school. Increasing student engagement has been an explicit goal of many school and district improvement efforts, especially at the high school level. As the capabilities of portable technology continue to…

The purpose of the analyses described in this report was to evaluate both the effects of two contrasting approaches to parent-provided child learning opportunities and the direct and indirect effects on both proximal and distal parent social-affective behavior and verbal appraisals. The participants were 71 children with significant developmental…

Classroom management, although considered one of the essentials of the optimal learning experience, is often a challenge for teachers. Certain classroom management strategies, such as group contingency interventions and token economies, are evidence-based strategies to aid teachers in gaining successful management of the classroom. The utilization…

The graduated reinforcement procedure (also known as differential reinforcement) is an often-used procedure in the field of Applied Behavior Analysis to teach new skills and increase pro-social behaviors. In this study, the researchers used a multi-element design to evaluated the graduated reinforcement procedure for six children with a diagnosis…

The impact of differences in level of baseline responding on contingency learning in the first year was examined by considering the response acquisition of infants classified into baseline response quartiles. Whereas the three lower baseline groups showed the predicted increment in responding to a contingency, the highest baseline responders did…

The utility of reinforcement-based procedures has been well established in the behavior analysis literature and is commonly used in educational settings. However, the overjustification effect is one commonly cited criticism of programs that use tangible items as reinforcers. In the current studies, we evaluated the effects of tangible rewards…

The use of extinction procedures or the discontinuation of reinforcement following a behavior targeted for reduction is often used to enhance the efficacy of behavioral interventions. Unfortunately, the application of extinction procedures is associated with several side effects that can produce potentially harmful and counterproductive outcomes.…

The purpose of this study was to determine the relative efficacy of non-contingent reinforcement (NCR) and differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) after behavioral functions were identified through indirect, descriptive, and experimental assessment. Participants included three preschool-age children in three center-based classrooms in a…

Research has identified a variety of effective approaches for responding to errors during discrete-trial training. In one commonly used method, the therapist delivers a prompt contingent on the occurrence of an incorrect response and then re-presents the trial so that the learner has an opportunity to perform the correct response independently.…

Research on stimulus-stimulus pairing to induce novel vocalizations in nonverbal children has typically employed response-independent pairing (RIP) procedures to condition speech sounds as reinforcers. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effects of a response-contingent pairing (RCP) procedure on the vocalizations of three…