3.7: Evaluate Long-term Effects of Treatment

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Page ID: 85506

Samuel Sennott, Sheldon Loman, Kristy Lee Park, Luis F. Pérez, Michael J. Kennedy, John Romig, & Wendy J. Rodgers
Portland State University via Portland State University Library

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ABA is committed to teaching skills that are practical, relevant, and functional for the student. The last ABA characteristic is generality, which describes whether interventions produce lasting change in behavior that occurs in all relevant settings. A student has truly learned the skill when the behavior is shown after a period of time (e.g., 6 months), untaught scenarios, and novel responses to similar antecedents (Baer, 1982). This happens when practitioners incorporate generalization strategies into teaching procedures through multiple teaching examples, practice opportunities outside of the teaching setting, and, importantly, teach the students how to recruit reinforcement (i.e., teacher attention) through socially acceptable behaviors (Reeve, Reeve, Townsend, & Poulson, 2007). Incidental teaching has been used to promote generalization of language skills (Hart & Risley, 1968), social interactions (Strain, 1983), and reciprocal interactions with peer models (McGee, Almeida, & Sulzer-Azaroff, 1992). This teaching procedure occurs in the naturalistic context and consists of a prescribed chain of student-teacher (or peer-sibling) interactions in which the student initiates a request (e.g., reaching, pointing, vocalizing) and the item requested is given contingent upon appropriate asking in the targeted mode.

In this section, the characteristics of applied behavior analysis were described within a model that all ABA-based approaches have in common which are: 1) select a socially relevant behavior, 2) measure the behavior with a reliable data collection system, 3) select an evidence-based treatment procedure, 4) implement the procedures with fidelity, and 5) evaluate the long-term effects of the treatment.