A common concern among parents, teachers, BCBAs, and administrators is that a particular child is failing to generalize the skill that he or she learned. It is great that she can speak in sentences in therapy, but how come she doesn’t do it in the cafeteria with peers? It is great that self-injury is at zero levels when his familiar para is present, but how come when she is out, we have so many emergencies? I’m thrilled that he is using the potty in the preschool classroom, but why won’t he do it at home?
Typically, we tend to assume that a failure to generalize is a characteristic of the learner, and it is part of his or her disability. But we know what happens when you assume things. In fact, just about everybody will have trouble with generalization under many teaching conditions.
The expected outcome of most behavior changes is that generalization will not occur. Generalization takes careful planning, or it is unlikely to happen. Behavior analysis has developed a host of tactics that make generalization more likely. The key lesson for me is that changing a behavior is relatively easy. The hard part is making the behavior change work in everyday life. That’s why it is essential to not work on too many behavior changes at one time. You might be “successful” at making the changes, but the odds of them having practical value are low if you don’t have the time to do all the work necessary to make those changes practical in the real world.
In my experience, you are not likely to be rewarded for the behavior of doing a great job on relatively few behavior changes. In most situations in schools and with insurance companies, the rewards come for making a lot of successful changes. When people see a big fat reports with lots of pretty graphs, they are impressed. No one is measuring years later when those changes fall apart. You need to think about the long-term best interest of the client. That’s hard to do when the opposite behavior is often reinforced more immediately.