From Choice-Making to Adult Living: Teaching for Independence and Generalization becomes clinically important the moment a team has to turn good intentions into reliable action inside home routines and caregiver-led implementation, adult services and community participation. In From Choice-Making to Adult Living: Teaching for Independence and Generalization, for this course, the practical stakes show up in skills that remain meaningful when school supports disappear and adult expectations change, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via BABAT
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Join Free →Despite empirical support for skill acquisition, generalizing learned skills across meaningful contexts (e.g., home, adult placement) remains worthy of discussion. This symposium presents four studies encompassing essential life skills development, independence, and generalization. The first presentation investigates a mand training procedure with echoic and gestural prompts for children with autism to request choice-making opportunities. The data demonstrate that participants learned to emit the mand under appropriate establishing operations and the importance of choice as a conditioned reinforcer. Self-advocacy of preferences represents an important step toward fostering independence. The second presentation focuses on the transition from youth to adulthood by surveying behavioral prerequisites critical for successful placement in adult residential settings. Results highlight differences in perspective between teachers and adult service providers. Safety emerged as a key concern, influencing which behaviors are deemed essential for adult residential living. This study underscores the importance of identifying and teaching prerequisite behaviors early to facilitate smooth transitions and minimize the need for extensive support in adult living environments. The third presentation evaluates telehealth behavioral skills training (BST) delivered to parents of children with ASD. The primary researcher trained parents to implement graduated guidance when teaching their child to complete an arbitrary task. Findings indicated high parental implementation fidelity with evidence of generalization of the teaching procedures to a daily living skill. This study highlights the potential of remote training modalities to empower caregivers as active agents in skill acquisition, thus promoting skill maintenance beyond clinical settings. The final presentation explores the effects of training with multiple exemplars and a mediating response on the recombinative generalization of an arbitrary match-to-sample task. This study offers insights into each strategy's limitations and proposes an alternative instructional method to combat them. Altogether, these four presentations illustrate a developmental continuum in ABA, from early communication and choice-making to preparing individuals for adult living through generalizable and socially valid interventions.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1.5 | General |
| COA | 1.5 | — |
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
256 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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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.