Many of us are concerned about the long-term success of our students. Therefore, we are interested in studies showing that the behavior maintained over time. Studying maintenance is hard to do as it is expensive and time consuming to do long-term follow-ups. Certainly, we have some studies published in the research literature, but not many. One problem with this is you have to wait a long time to see if you are successful. By the time we find out it didn’t work, it’s too late to do anything about it.
Another problem is that in behavior analysis, maintenance is typically conducted under an identical set of conditions. That might be important for research purposes—if the situation changed, you might not know whether the behavior failed to maintain because the situation is different, or because of the passage of time since the intervention.
In reality though, if you can manage to keep everything exactly the same, it shouldn’t be that hard to achieve maintenance. Also, in real world settings, things never remain the same. The para is switched; there is a new way to line up in the cafeteria; the family moves to a new home; there is a new baby in the house; and on and on.
One potential solution was identified in this article. Specifically, the researchers argued we aren’t very interested in maintenance under static conditions. What we really want to know is what happens when there is a maintenance challenge. It seems to me testing that is something practitioners can do. We can set up common challenges to maintenance to see if the behavior maintains under new conditions. That has two big benefits. First, we can test whether the behavior is likely to maintain under practical conditions. Second, we don’t have to wait a long time to do it. We can do it as soon as the student is ready, and get immediate feedback on whether the intervention is likely to be successful in the long-run. If not, we can do something about that quickly rather than wait for long-term maintenance data.