Remote Teaching of AB Graphs in Microsoft Excel
A 45-minute workbook-plus-checklist package gets college students to 100% accuracy on AB Excel graphs.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Mondati and colleagues tested a 43-minute remote package that teaches college students to build AB graphs in Excel.
The package used Lehardy’s workbook, short videos, a step-by-step checklist, and live Zoom feedback.
All students worked from home; no one had prior Excel graphing experience.
What they found
Every student hit near 100% accuracy on the final AB graph after one session.
The whole training took less than an hour and no extra practice was needed.
How this fits with other research
Lehardy et al. (2021) ran a similar remote BST package and moved master’s students from 25% to 86-96% accuracy.
The new study pushes the ceiling higher: the same core tools now reach 100% with undergraduates.
Chok (2019) and Fuller et al. (2019) give free Excel phase-line tricks, but they don’t teach people how to use them; Mondati shows you can train mastery quickly instead of hoping staff figure it out.
Why it matters
You can copy this 45-minute package in your next staff meeting. Hand out the workbook, play the videos, walk through the checklist, give live feedback. New RBTs or grad students will leave the room able to build clean AB graphs that supervisors can read at a glance.
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Join Free →Email the Lehardy workbook and checklist, schedule a 45-min Zoom, and have each trainee share-screen while building an AB graph for live feedback.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Graphing is an important skill that is used across various career fields. Behavior analysts have examined various methods for training individuals to use various graphing software packages (e.g., GraphPad Prism, Microsoft Excel) to manually create graphs. Behavior-analytic techniques, however, have been underused in fields outside of behavior analysis. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to use the graphing tools developed by Lehardy et al. (2021) to create a treatment package featuring the graphing workbook, video tutorials, an itemized graphing checklist, and corrective feedback to train college students to create AB graphs in Microsoft Excel. The current study addressed some of the limitations and comments in the social validity survey of Lehardy et al. by providing the itemized checklist concurrently with the video tutorials. Graphing behavior increased to near 100% levels for all participants with an average session time of 43.58 min. Therefore, the results indicate that this procedure may be effective in increasing graphing skills in less than an hour with students across fields and levels. This study provides further evidence that behavior-analytic techniques are useful in a plethora of scenarios, and we should aim to disseminate these techniques within these various areas. The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40617-024-00943-z.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s40617-024-00943-z