Agility: What It Is, How to Measure It, and How to Use It
Agility gives you a simple speed-score that tells you in real time if a program is working or stalling.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hong et al. (2021) wrote a how-to guide, not an experiment.
They explain agility: the speed-up pattern you see when a learner gets faster each week.
The paper shows you step-by-step how to compute celeration multipliers and use them to spot fast progress early.
What they found
No new data are given.
The authors give rules for turning daily charts into clear speed-growth numbers you can act on.
How this fits with other research
Frampton et al. (2023) extends this idea. Their matrix-training tutorial says, "Use celeration to see which combinations explode into new skills."
Falligant et al. (2024) offers a cousin lens. They teach you to split response streams into bouts and pauses; S et al. teach you to split learning into speed and bounce.
Critchfield (2018) shares the same goal: faster learning. Critchfield wants stimulus-relation drills to create free skills; S et al. give the ruler that proves the speed happened.
Why it matters
You can start tracking agility tomorrow. Pick one skill, time each trial, drop the numbers into a celeration multiplier. When the line climbs, keep the program. When it flats, change it. That quick math saves weeks of guess-work and shows funders why you adjusted the plan.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A positive and expected by-product of a well-programmed instructional sequence is an escalation of learning, where skills are acquired more quickly as teaching goes on. Despite the importance of this effect in behavior analysis and education, techniques for detecting and analyzing it are rarely observed in practice settings. A behavioral approach to this phenomenon is rooted in the term <i>agility</i>, which has persisted in the precision-teaching community as a description of desirable acquisition patterns. Precision teachers have long carried forward a loose definition of agility as "celerating celerations." Although this definition might succeed in generally orienting practitioners toward the goal of helping people acquire new skills more quickly, its lack of technical specificity has hindered efforts to fully integrate such analyses into practice. In this article, the authors define agility and distinguish it from other concepts common to education and behavior analysis. Further, a tutorial for quantifying and analyzing agility using frequency, celeration, and bounce multipliers is presented in detail. Finally, the practical implications afforded by analyses of agility are delineated.
, 2021 · doi:10.1007/s40617-020-00465-4