Focus on Behavior Analysis in Education: Achievements, Challenges, & Opportunities
This book is a collection of papers developed from presentations delivered at The Ohio State University'sThird Focus on Behavior Analysis in Education Conference,which took place in September 2002. The three-day program included 80 invited addresses, research papers, and posters—many by the most prominent behavioral educators in the world. Scholars from Canada, Iceland, Israel, and Japan made the conference an international event. (Videotapes of 11 of the invited addresses may be viewed on the Internet; see page xiv for details.)Like its predecessors from the first two OSU Focus Conferences (Gardner et al., 1994; Heward, Heron, Hill, & Trap-Porter, 1984), this book covers a wide range of topics and issues. Collectively, the contributing authors present literature reviews, conceptual analyses, and data from several original studies; they describe advancements in curricula, classroom and schoolwide interventions, and teacher training programs; and they offer personal perspectives on the current status and future directions of behavior analysis in education.Organization of This TextThe book's 19 chapters are organized into four parts. Part I, "Achieving Improvements in the Lives of Children with Autism," includes two chapters on the role of applied behavior analysis in the lives of children with autism and their families. The late Don Baer, one of the founding fathers of applied behavior analysis, describes the required features of applied behavior analysis as an educational treatment and its critical value to all children who depend on systematic instruction to learn useful skills. Catherine Maurice and Bridget Taylor discuss challenges and opportunities for educators, therapists, and parents who want to provide effective help for children diagnosed with autism. Maurice and Taylor offer reflections and recommendations gleaned from a decade of direct action, research, and publishing; interactions with parents, teachers, therapists, and children; and observations of the political forces at play in the world of autism intervention.Part II, "Recent Developments, Continuing Challenges, and Emerging Opportunities," begins with two chapters outlining recent contributions by behavior analysis to curriculum design and assessment for beginning reading instruction. Janet Twyman, Joe Layng, Greg Stikeleather, and Kelly Hobbins describe Headsprout Reading, a commercially available online reading program that combines behavior analysis, instructional design, usability testing, and an organizational systems approach. Ed Kame'enui, Roland Good, and Beth Harn examine a school-wide model for preventing beginning reading failure that is based on early and frequent measures of specific reading behaviors as a reliable predictor of reading risk.George Sugai and Rob Horner provide a rationale, examples, and guidelines for building a preventive continuum of positive behavior support that extends behavioral interventions and practices to the school and district levels. Charlie Greenwood, Judy Carta, and Dale Walker provide clear examples of how indicators for early communication, movement, social interaction, and adaptive behavior can be used as important measures for early childhood growth and development.Stephanie Peterson, Nancy Neef, Renee Van Norman, and Summer Ferreri critically examine the research literature on assessment of choices and the factors that influence choice making in educational settings. They propose a model for conceptualizing and assessing choice making and describe its implications for teaching children to make beneficial choices.The five chapters in Part III, "Training, Supporting, and Learning with Measurably Effective Teachers," examine various issues and approaches to preservice teacher preparation and the professional development of practicing teachers. Larry Maheady, Gregory Harper, and Barbara Mallette describe the development, implementation, and ongoing evaluation and refinement of a teacher preparation program grounded in the beliefs that highly effective teachers engage in a systematic and recursive process—planning-instructing-reflecting—responding-while teaching and that they adjust their instructional practice in response to ongoing measures of pupil performance. Jo Webber describes how cooperative learning techniques and field experiences can help preservice teachers learn to manage difficult student behavior by applying ABA principles. Sheila Alber and Janet Nelson describe how student teachers and their mentor teachers can work collaboratively to conduct classroom research. The authors present this approach as one method for decreasing the research-to-practice gap by transforming preservice teachers and their mentor teachers from passive consumers of research to active change agents.Chris McDonough, Tina Covington, Sayahca Endo, Deborah Meinberg, Trina Spencer, and Dave Bicard address the question, What does it mean to be a behavioral school? These authors outline the philosophy, instructional methods, and outcome measures that they believe define behavioral schooling, and they describe how these measures are applied to five distinct groups of learners at the Hawthorne Country Day School: students, teachers, teaching assistants, supervisors, and parents.In the final chapter in Part III, Dick Malott describes a behavioral-systems approach for teaching behavior analysis that he and his students have developed and refined at Western Michigan University. Malott's approach integrates goal-directed systems design, behavioral systems engineering, performance management, and a skills-training model of education.Part IV, "Perspectives on the Current and Future Functions of Behavior Analysis in Education," consists of seven chapters examining the current and future role of applied behavior analysis in education. Ilene Schwartz presents a framework for describing meaningful educational outcomes for all children in inclusive settings, and she makes recommendations for the role of applied behavior analysis in helping educators achieve those outcomes.Lloyd Peterson and Laura Lacy-Rismiller suggest that a critical element of a school's effectiveness is having all members of a school's community focus on building positive, prosocial student behaviors rather than suppressing inappropriate behaviors. They address the challenges of changing the views of teachers, administrators, parents, and/or students who might otherwise support a punishment-based climate in the school to one that supports reinforcement.Tim Heron, Matt Tincani, Stephanie Peterson, and April Miller use Plato's allegory of the cave as a metaphor for examining the present educational system and the standard of best practice by which it should operate. In their revised allegory, teachers imprisoned by the false promises of novel, untested, and ill-defined instructional ideas can be released from the bondage of their chains by turning to fundamental principles and key contributions of behavior analysis.Amos Rolider and Saul Axelrod describe the results of a study showing that the public's acceptance of behavioral interventions increases significantly when those interventions are described in conversational language followed by an explanation of the intended outcome of the prescribed interventions. Purely technical descriptions of behavioral interventions correlate with a perception by the public that those interventions were less understandable and less compassionate.John Cooper compares the research traditions of applied behavior analysis and precision teaching and concludes that both approaches produce applied research important for advancing the science of behavior and educational practice. He notes that, although the steady-state experimental logic used in applied behavior analysis is well suited to the discovery of functional relationships, the measurement and charting conventions used by precision teachers are appropriate for investigating questions about behavioral dynamics.Judy Cameron debunks the widely held notion in education that rewards and reinforcement undermine an individual's intrinsic motivation to learn. Cameron describes the original studies in social psychology used as evidence for the negative effects of rewards and summarizes the results of several reviews and meta-analyses of that literature that show that the argument against the use of rewards is an overgeneralization based on a narrow set of circumstances. She suggests that the so-called negative effects of rewards have been used to reject the science of behavior, its principles, and its programs.In the book's final chapter, Bill Heward contends that achieving significant improvements in education will require reducing the disparity between what behavioral research has discovered about effective teaching practices and the curriculum and instruction experienced by most students. He suggests some reasons why applied behavior analysis is well suited to contribute to educational reform, identifies a competing list of reasons that impede the acceptance and adoption of behavioral interventions in education, and offers some suggestions to those who wish to see applied behavior analysis play a more meaningful role in education.Who Can Use This Text?As co-editors, we hope this book becomes a useful resource for three groups: (1) educators seeking information and resources on measurably effective instructional tools; (2) students of behavior analysis wishing to learn about its applications, accomplishments, and future research needs in education; and (3) anyone—pre-service education major, in-service teacher, school administrator, parent, or consumer—who has heard about the "behavioral approach" and wonders what it is all about. We believe this book provides readers from all three groups with an accessible, accurate, and representative account of the relevance and the potential of applied behavior analysis in education.