Frequency of Mand Instruction Reported in Behavioral, Special Education, and Speech Journals.
Mand intervention studies are scattered—behavior journals publish them most, but special-education and speech journals add unique contexts you might be missing.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors counted how many mand instruction papers appear in three kinds of journals.
They looked at behavior, special-education, and speech journals for a ten-year span.
Each paper was tagged for age group, setting, and who the learners were.
What they found
Behavior journals printed the most mand studies by far.
Special-education and speech journals printed fewer, but added different settings and learner types.
No single field owns the topic; each adds pieces the others miss.
How this fits with other research
Valentino et al. (2019) dug deeper into the same pool and found most mand studies skip EO/AO probes.
Bao et al. (2017) counted all verbal operants and saw mand plus intraverbal work dominating autism papers since 2001.
Petursdottir et al. (2017) tracked citations and showed the whole verbal-behavior field has exploded since 2005.
Together the four reviews paint one picture: lots of mand studies exist, but reporting quality is still thin.
Why it matters
If you only read behavior journals you will miss speech-room and classroom tricks for teaching mands.
Cross the aisle: pull procedures from speech journals and add the EO checks that behavior journals recommend.
Your next program can be both richer and better reported.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The authors reviewed 10 years of research literature on teaching mands to individuals with developmental disabilities. Articles were selected from journals associated with three professional organizations (e.g., Association for Behavior Analysis, Council for Exceptional Children, and American Speech and Hearing Association). Findings were reported as frequencies of publication across journals and sets of journal. Furthermore, we reported on the several contextual variables reported within each study (i.e., age of participants, setting, change agent, response topography, generalization). Implications for practitioners are discussed.
Behavior analysis in practice, 2016 · doi:10.2511/rpsd.35.3-4.116