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Situation You are a behavioral specialist for a rural school…
Situation
You are a behavioral specialist for a rural school district in West Texas. You have been called in to help a teacher work with a student who is falling behind his peers because his behavior in the classroom is interfering with his learning.
Freddy is a 9-yr-old boy who has cerebral palsy. He is placed in an integrated elementary school classroom, and has a full-time paraprofessional assigned to work with him during the school day. His classroom teacher has never had a student who has cerebral palsy in her class before, but she is willing to try anything you recommend. While Freddy is a generally happy young boy he often struggles to complete hands-on assignments and to engage in appropriate playground interactions with his peers. During instructional time, while his classmates are cuttings out maps, pasting pictures, building a model, or completing writing assignments, he will sulk alone in the corner, refuse to answer questions from the teacher, and shove any work placed in front of him away. The only time he even attempts to complete any work is if his paraprofessional does all of the work for him and only makes him describe what he would do. This is a concern for everyone since if Freddy won’t engage with lessons, he is going to struggle worse and fall further behind as time goes by.
You decide to collect some baseline data to determine the extent of the problem Freddy is having in the classroom.
(1) Label and write a behavioral definition for one of Freddy’s behaviors that are interfering with his academic success.
(2) Label and write a behavioral definition for one behavior that Freddy should be engaging in to increase his academic success.
(3) Describe a method for measuring one of Freddy’s behaviors you defined above. Label the behavior you are measuring and describe the measurement system in sufficient detail so that the teacher or the paraprofessional could use it.
(4) Describe and provide an example of how you would evaluate and calculate the reliability of the measurement system you have described in question 3.
Situation cont.
After collecting baseline data about Freddy’s behavior in class, it is clear to you that he has a significant problem with the motor skills required to complete his work. This has negatively impacted his motivation to attempt hands-on work and writing activities. In particular, you have noticed that he will not engage in any hands-on work or writing assignments unless his paraprofessional is working directly with him and completing nearly every step in the process. Also, he refuses to even attempt work unless the paraprofessional promises him that he will get to play on his iPad after a project is done. The iPad seems to be the only free-time activity he enjoys at school.
Based on those observations, you decide to create a prompting and reward-based system (i.e., a token economy) to use with Freddy to increase his motivation and motor skills to complete the hands-on and writing assignments. The school day typically contains four to five 15-minute hands-on activities and two to three writing assignments with different subjects being covered during each of the two activities. You decide to evaluate prompting plus a token economy because you don’t want to frequently interrupt instructional time by presenting Freddy with access to his preferred activities throughout the lesson. Instead, you decide to use the token economy so that he can earn tokens contingent on task completion that he can trade in for access to a preferred activity for a period of time after he has accumulated a specific number of tokens. You decide to use the token economy during the 15-minute hands-on activities and while Freddy completes his writing assignments. For your intervention, you will have the paraprofessional use most-to-least prompting and deliver a token contingent on prompted task completion to improve his motor skills. After Freddy earns 5 tokens, he can have access to his iPad for 5 minutes, because he seems to really enjoy playing on his iPad. Over time, you will have the paraprofessional fade his/her prompts, change the contingency for Freddy to earn tokens so that he must complete a step of a task either independently or at a less intrusive prompt level, and increase the number of tokens Freddy earns before he can have access to his iPad.
You realize that it will be important to determine if the prompting and token economy is effective in terms of improving Freddy’s completion of hands-on activities and writing assignments, so you decide to evaluate the intervention using a single-subject research design.
(5) What is the IV/IVs in this evaluation?
(6) What is the DV/DVs in this evaluation?
(7) What experimental design will you use to evaluate the intervention?
(8) Why did you select this design?
(9) Create a graph showing hypothetical data supporting the conclusion that the IV has functional control over the DV you selected for this study. The graph should reflect the experimental design you chose to use and should show a clear functional relationship between the token economy and Freddy’s behavior. Make the graph in Excel.
Paste the graph here:
(10) Identify 3 relevant stakeholders in this situation who you need to talk to about this intervention with Freddy and, explain why their opinion about the situation is important to consider.
(11) Provide one example of a question you would ask these stakeholders about the three types of social validity below.
Social validity of the target behaviors:
Social validity of the intervention:
Social validity of the outcomes:
