ABA BASICS
This is anything a person does that can be observed and measured.
What is behavior?
If a consequence makes a behavior more likely to occur again, this has happened.
What is reinforcement?
The four commonly taught functions of behavior are attention, escape, access to tangibles, and this.
What is automatic/sensory reinforcement?
Counting how many times a behavior occurs.
What is frequency?
Instead of saying a learner was “being bad,” a behavior analyst would try to describe behavior in this way.
What is observable and measurable/objective?
The scientific study of behavior and the environmental variables that influence it.
What is behavior analysis?
Giving a child a piece of candy after they clean up results in more cleaning up in the future.
What is positive reinforcement?
A student screams when given math work. The teacher removes the worksheet, and screaming becomes more frequent. This is the likely function.
What is escape?
Measuring how long a behavior lasts.
What is duration?
“He knows better” makes an assumption about something we cannot directly observe. In ABA, we'd avoid relying on these kinds of explanations.
What are mentalistic explanations?
Something that happens immediately before a behavior occurs.
What is an antecedent?
Buckling your seatbelt makes the annoying car alarm stop, and you buckle up faster next time.
What is negative reinforcement?
A child cries in the grocery store, receives candy, and crying in stores increases. This is the likely function.
What is access to tangibles?
Measuring the amount of time between an instruction and the beginning of the response.
What is latency?
“She had a tantrum” isn't very useful until we provide this.
What is an operational definition?
Something that happens immediately after a behavior occurs.
What is a consequence?
In positive reinforcement, the word positive means this.
What is something is added?
A learner repeatedly hums when alone as well as when other people are present. This might suggest this type of reinforcement.
What is automatic reinforcement?
A behavior occurred 8 times during a two-hour observation. Reporting it as 4 times per hour is this type of measurement.
What is rate?
“Every time I tell him no, he loses it” contains information that might help us identify this part of the ABC contingency.
What is the antecedent?
The three-term contingency is commonly abbreviated using these three letters.
What is ABC?
True or false: A preferred item is automatically a reinforcer.
What is false? (It is only a reinforcer if it increases the future frequency of behavior.)
The same behavior can serve more than one of these.
What is a function?
Recording whether a behavior occurs at any point during each interval is called this.
What is partial-interval recording?
“She only does it for attention” is a hypothesis about this.
What is the function of behavior?