POOGI for ABA

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.

As I have talked about before, if we care about the child maintaining the skills that he or she has learned, we better think about making the reinforcement natural. That means that no one has to plan anything to make reinforcement happen. This is incredibly hard to do in many practical settings.

Not only is creating natural contingencies hard, but today I want to talk about the fact that even if you succeed, it might not be enough.

I was once working with a 3^rd grader with autism and minor behavior problems. We developed an extremely successful intervention based on the recruiting literature. Specifically, we taught him to:

1. Check his work and make sure it was correct
2. Raise his hand and be patient for the teacher to call on him.
3. Accept a redirection if the teacher told him it was not a good time
4. When the teacher called on him, he would say “Can you check my work?”
5. He would politely thank the teacher.
6. If the teacher said something unexpected like, “I can’t right now.” Or “you have to correct these errors.” He responded politely.

The intervention was a big success. The student learned the skills to obtain appropriate attention, which was sufficient to reduce the mild behavior problems that were bothering the teacher. The best part is that it was meeting a natural contingency. The teacher just acted as she naturally would. We didn’t do any training for the teacher or implement any sort of “behavior plan.” That’s the ideal–natural contingencies of reinforcement like this are what we need to get the long-term success that everyone wants!

Fast forward to 4^th grade. The student started using the same strategy as we had taught in him 3^rd grade. Unfortunately, the 4^th grade teacher had a system where she came around to check the work of each individual child. If kids raised their hands, she would yell “Put your hands down! I will come to you!” The behavior problems started to increase again, and intervention was again required in 4^th grade.

I think the lesson here is that, of course, we have to shoot for natural contingencies, which is incredibly hard. As frustrating as it is, even if you complete that difficult task, often it is not sufficient. We also have to teach our students to be flexible enough to change if the contingencies change.  There are limited studies to help guide practitioners through this problem. It is a big challenge for all of us to Poogi in this area.

One of my consulting cases was for a child at a public school with severe behavior problems. I typically consulted with the school about once a week. The behaviors were largely well-controlled, but we still had extreme problems that occurred rarely. Therefore, the school team formed an emergency response team. This team included several people who would always have a walkie and be on-call in the case of an emergency.

One day, I walked into the school just as the emergency response team was being called. But when the school secretary (who apparently did not remember my name) saw me, she called it off and said “don’t worry—the man in blue is here.”  I then went to assist with the emergency that was occurring.

I am often the person that gets called in an emergency situation. Although as I get older, this is less and less likely to be me. I suspect we have a potential problem in that there are hidden reinforcers to the people who are called to handle emergencies. Handling an emergency involves breaking of the routine, novel problem solving, people deferring to the expert, a feeling of accomplishment, and often thanks from grateful people. These reinforcers can shape your behavior in insidious ways. Most importantly, you might be spending too much time on emergencies and not enough time teaching the appropriate alternative behaviors that will meet a natural contingency that will make a difference in the long run.

I recently read the book Upstream. He discusses one of the issues in preventing problems from occurring is that we celebrate the lifeguard who saves a drowning victim, but not the swim teacher who prevents someone from drowning in the first place.

Certainly, in most organizations there are huge rewards for the people who are called to handle the emergency situations. That’s appropriate. But I suspect we probably don’t do enough for the staff in the preschool who work daily with a child to teach mands and build tolerance levels that prevent these extreme problems in the first place. It’s a very tricky problem as there are certainly ways to prevent problems that are not in the child’s best interest.