Establishing Praise as a Conditioned Reinforcer becomes clinically important the moment a team has to turn good intentions into reliable action inside case conceptualization, intervention design, staff training, and literature-informed problem solving. In Establishing Praise as a Conditioned Reinforcer, for this course, the practical stakes show up in stronger conceptual consistency and better translational decision making, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Kadiant
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →Praise and other forms of attention may not function as reinforcers for the behavior of children with autism. As a result, teachers and caregivers often rely on arbitrary reinforcers to build new skills and reinforce appropriate behaviors. However, long-term reliance on arbitrary reinforcers may have potential problems involving practicality, social validity, and effectiveness in maintaining behavior across contexts and over time. Although it is has been recommended that praise be paired with primary reinforcers in order to establish it as a reinforcer, there is little research demonstrating that these procedures are effective, or informing teachers and caregivers as to the most optimal way to arrange the pairing procedure. The presentation will provide an overview of previous methods used to establish praise as a reinforcer for children with autism. The results of a response a response-stimulus pairing procedure that compared pairing praise with one reinforcer versus pairing praise with multiple reinforcers for five children with autism will be presented. Learning Objectives: Describe the implications of relying on arbitrary reinforcers to build skills and increase appropriate behaviors for individuals with autism Describe three different methods used to establish praise as a reinforcer for individuals with autism: (a) discrimination training, (b) stimulus-stimulus pairing, and (c) response-stimulus pairing. Describe the results of the current study and potential implications for the use of reinforcers in applied instructional settings
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
Laura Dudley serves as Assistant Clinical Professor and Program Director for the Applied Behavior Analysis programs at Northeastern University. She is a Doctoral-level Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA-D) and licensed Applied Behavior Analyst (LABA) who earned her MS in Applied Behavior Analysis at Northeastern University and her PhD at Simmons College. Dr. Dudley has more than 20 years of experience in designing, developing, implementing, and monitoring quality programs for children with autism and related disabilities within public school systems. She co-created the Autism Curriculum Encyclopedia, an online curriculum for individuals with autism that currently serves thousands of children with autism around the globe. Dr. Dudley’s research interests include experimental functional analysis of challenging behaviors, conditioned reinforcement, inclusion, and best practice in online teaching.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
280 research articles with practitioner takeaways
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
You earn CEUs from a dozen different places. Upload any certificate — from here, your employer, conferences, wherever — and always know exactly where you stand. Learning, Ethics, Supervision, all handled.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.