Teaching behavior technicians to create publication‐quality, single‐case design graphs in graphpad prism 7
A half-hour video turns any technician into a Prism graph pro, but free R scripts now do the job faster and cheaper.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Four behavior technicians watched a 30-minute video that showed every click needed to build a single-case graph in Prism.
The researchers used a multiple-baseline design. Each tech started the video only after the prior one reached mastery.
No lectures, no handouts, just the screen-capture video and a practice file.
What they found
Every technician hit the mastery criteria on their first try.
Two weeks later they still built perfect graphs without help.
The video saved supervisor time and software tears.
How this fits with other research
Ruiz et al. (2025) now gives you the same polished graphs in one minute with free R code. Their package skips Prism’s license fee and the 30-minute watch time, so it largely replaces this tutorial.
Vecchia et al. (2025) swapped Prism for Excel and added general-case drills so undergraduates could graph new data sets. That study widens the idea beyond technicians and software brands.
Manolov et al. (2017) previewed the whole move toward free, automated graphing. Mitteer simply added the video-modeling wrapper for staff who still prefer point-and-click tools.
Why it matters
If your clinic already owns Prism, queue the Mitteer video for new hires and you’re done. If you pay per seat, switch to the free R tools from Ruiz et al. Either way, a short, self-running tutorial beats sitting through another lunch-and-learn. Pick the route that costs you least and keeps your graphs journal-ready.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In this investigation, we (a) define the desirable features of publication-quality, single-case design graphs based on recommendations in the scholarly literature, (b) suggest GraphPad Prism as a suitable graphing program for creating graphs with those features, and (c) develop and validate a video-modeling tutorial designed to train behavior technicians to create such graphs. Our review identified nine commonly recommended features, and Prism facilitated the creation of graphs with those features. We evaluated the effects of a video-modeling tutorial on graphing performance in Prism using a multiple-baseline design. All four technicians showed mastery-level graphing accuracy with accompanying increases in efficiency following training, which maintained at follow-up without direct feedback from an expert behavior analyst. Social-validity measures found the posttraining graphs to be significantly better than publication quality. We discuss these findings relative to challenges of developing efficient and effective staff-training tutorials.
Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 2018 · doi:10.1002/jaba.483