Episode 325 - Safety Skills

Summary

---

ABA Inside Track – Episode 325: Safety Skills

Date: October 22, 2025
Hosts: Robert (Rob) Perry Crews, Diana Perry Crews, Jackie McDonald

---

Overview

This episode of ABA Inside Track dives into the vital, yet often overlooked, topic of safety skills training for children, especially those who are neurodivergent. The hosts discuss peer-reviewed research on effective methods for teaching safety-related behaviors—such as avoiding dangerous objects and responding to emergencies—using behavioral skills training (BST) and related interventions. They also examine recent studies, barriers practitioners face, best practice recommendations, and future directions in the field.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. What Are Safety Skills and Why Do They Matter?

• Definition & Relevance:
  • Safety skills help individuals respond appropriately to environmental hazards (e.g., guns, poisons, fires, abductions).
  • Incidents like traffic accidents, accidental poisonings, and accidental shootings are major threats to life, underscoring the importance of safety skills (05:55).
• Social vs. Physical Threats:
  • Safety can relate to physical environmental dangers (e.g., finding a firearm) or social dangers (e.g., sexual abuse lures, abductions).

2. Common Approaches: Informational vs. Active Training

• Informational Programs:
  • Merely telling or showing children safety rules, such as watching a cartoon, has minimal effectiveness. "They don't work. The informational programs… children don't engage in the skills," (07:45, Jackie).
• Behavioral Skills Training (BST):
  • Active, evidence-based approach involving rule instruction, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback—shown repeatedly to be effective for most children.
  • Standard steps:
    1. Avoid the threat (don’t touch)
    2. Move away from the threat
    3. Tell a responsible adult
       "You can use that for anything... which is kind of nice." (08:27, Jackie)
• In Situ Training:
  • Real-world practice that occurs if BST alone is insufficient; practitioner gives feedback in the moment if the child fails the safety task (08:53-09:13).

3. Survey of Safety Skills Training in Practice

Article discussed: Bruni & Miltenberger (2024), Behavior Analysis in Practice

• Method:
  • Surveyed 853 BCBAs, BCaBAs, and RBTs (final sample: 695) primarily working with young, neurodivergent children in home settings (10:57-13:02).
• Findings:
  • Most recognized abduction, sexual abuse, poisonous substances, fire, and firearms as critical safety threats.
  • BUT: Very few reported their clients had the skills to actually respond to these threats: only 12-25% across scenarios (14:44-14:57).
  • 72% used behavioral interventions to teach poison safety; only 16% for firearms.
• Most Used Training:
  • BST was top (67%), followed by DTT, prompting, and (less supported) social stories (16:08).
• Barriers:
  • Major: Liability concerns (43%) and lack of expertise in BST.
  • Others: Prioritization of problem behavior, cultural concerns, perception that it’s the caregiver's job (17:55-18:15).

4. Deep Dives: What Does Effective Safety Skills Training Look Like?

(A) Gun Safety – Miltenberger et al., 2004

• Why Gun Safety?
  • Even today, accidental gun deaths in children remain a significant concern (141 children, U.S. 2021; 33:02).
• Training Process (23:21-29:59):
  • Multiple baseline design.
  • Children participate in a simulated situation with a (disabled) firearm.
  • BST is implemented: instructions, live modeling, rehearsal, and feedback, repeated until mastery (typically five perfect role-plays).
  • In situ assessment: If skills don’t transfer to the real environment, in situ training provided immediately.
  • Sometimes, tangible reinforcers (e.g., candy) added for those who don’t respond to BST/in situ alone.
• Effectiveness:
  • About half succeeded with BST alone, most with BST + in situ training, a few needed tangible reinforcement.

(B) Earthquake Safety – Kurt et al., 2024

• Context:
  • Teaches skills like "drop, cover, and hold on" during an earthquake and post-event evacuation (35:00-37:31).
• Methods:
  • Used video modeling (VM) instead of in-person BST for three children with ASD.
  • Video displayed actual steps in the participants’ classroom setting; video watched repeatedly with corresponding practice.
  • Steps included: drop down, cover head, hold onto table, line up, evacuate calmly (38:16-39:32).
• Findings:
  • All participants acquired skills after a variable number of video exposures (3-9), with decent generalization and short-term maintenance.

Noteworthy Discussion:

• Stop, Drop, and Roll as a Model:
  • The hosts recall practicing this fire safety routine in school as an example of effective (and memorable) safety BST: "We practice, too. Now that I…reflect on." (44:47, Diana)

5. Critical Features and Practice Recommendations

Article discussed: Bruni & Miltenberger (2022), Behavior Analysis in Practice

• Active Practice Is Key:
  • "Information only loses out. It does not prove to be as effective as those other types." (47:46, Diana)
  • Rehearsal + feedback must be included, whether through BST, in situ or VM.
• Generalization & Maintenance:
  • Train across settings and scenarios (multiple exemplars).
  • Collect data, probe for generalization, and plan for maintenance.
  • Most studies only assessed maintenance for 1–2 months, not long-term.
• Special Considerations:
  • More research needed for students with disabilities and on training parents or peers to teach safety routines.
  • Enhancements like prompting, tangible reinforcement, or VR can help where needed.

---

Memorable Quotes

• On Informational Training:
  "How come cartoons can make us buy toys but they can't teach us to not like touch things that will kill us?" (07:37, Rob)
• On BST's Universality:
  "You can use [BST] for anything... guns, poison, abduction, sexual lures…" (08:27, Jackie)
• On Making Training Fun and Memorable:
  "Stop, drop, and roll... kids love to fall on the ground and roll all over the place." (44:51, Rob)
• On Barriers:
  "The biggest barrier was concerns about liability, which is 40, 43%, which is huge." (17:55, Jackie)
• On Best Practices:
  "If you want to teach a safety skill, you should plan to have it include rehearsal and feedback." (48:16, Diana)

---

Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:13 – 03:39: Introduction, episode theme, and rationale for focusing on safety skills.
• 05:55 – 09:48: Overview of common threats, definition of BST and in situ training.
• 13:01 – 18:15: Survey study—how safety skills are taught, practitioner demographics, barriers.
• 23:20 – 32:00: Details of BST and its application for gun safety.
• 35:00 – 43:44: Earthquake safety skills, video modeling methods, and teaching steps.
• 46:04 – 52:59: Review of critical features, practice recommendations, research gaps.
• 53:52 – 54:43: Past episodes on the topic ("pairings").
• 54:43 – 56:24: Light-hearted discussion of poisonous "snacks" (illustrating poison safety).

---

Takeaways and Recommendations

• Practice and Feedback Matter: Never rely solely on informational programs; require active participant rehearsal with feedback.
• In Situ Training Is Critical: Realistic, real-life (as much as possible) practice increases the likelihood of correct response in an actual dangerous situation.
• Data and Generalization: Always collect data, assess generalization across contexts, and plan for maintenance; use multiple exemplars.
• Tangible Reinforcement and Enhancements: May be necessary for some learners, especially if BST and in situ alone are not effective.
• Parent/Peer Training and Accessibility: More research and practical resources needed to empower caregivers, teachers, and peers as effective safety skills trainers.
• Special Populations: Enhanced teaching procedures (prompting, reinforcement, modeling) are often necessary for children with disabilities.

---

For Further Exploration

Related episodes:

• #194 Abduction Prevention
• #132 Component Analysis of BST
• #15 Tech & Safety Skills with Dr. Vanslow
• #25 & #93 Virtual Reality for Safety Skills

---

Summary prepared by ABA Inside Track Podcast Summarizer

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to ABA Inside Track, the podcast that's like reading in your car but safer. I'm your host, Robert Perry Crews, and with me, as always, are my fabulous co hosts.

[C]

Hello, Rob. It's me, Diana Perry Cruz.

[A]

And it's me, your lovable friend, Jackie. Not Paracruz McDonald. I blew out the speakers already. I'm so good at blowing it out.

[C]

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

[B]

Turn you. Turn you down just a bit. Ah, well, I'm sorry. I feel like my energy is, like, real low because.

[A]

You want me to come over and shake you?

[B]

No. I mean, originally I was supposed to be at the Renaissance festival today, and instead I'm recording an extra podcast that we were going to do another time.

[A]

But you know what?

[B]

We are responsible and, like, I guess we're not going, so we should continue with our response. I brought it up. It's my own fault.

[A]

It is. I brought it up, too, though, at the exact same time.

[C]

Oh, did you?

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But do you know what.

[A]

Do you know what I found today?

[C]

What?

[A]

I found a gun in your basement.

[C]

No, you did not.

[A]

I did.

[B]

You did not.

[A]

In your couch cushion. Do you know what I did?

[B]

What?

[A]

You do? I left it there.

[C]

I didn't touch it. Okay, that was smart.

[A]

And I walked away and I told her.

[C]

Responsible adult.

[A]

Adult. I told Owen.

[B]

I mean, apparently it's not us, because we didn't even know this was in our couch cushions, but you like my new bit. I know we had a lot of bits. There was too many. Too many bits. This is a podcast.

[C]

You got to let Jackie have a bit.

[A]

Yeah, that was.

[C]

You can't be the only person that gets a bit.

[B]

Well, no one knows there's a bit coming until I do the bit.

[C]

That's not true.

[B]

Natural.

[C]

If you've listened to the show before, you know there's a bit.

[B]

Well, yeah, that's the bit. That's the bit. It's a bit. It's a repeating bit. And it's not a podcast about bits. It's not a podcast about these dissonant bits we've suddenly find ourselves in. It's not even a podcast about what else to do on a rainy day. It's podcast about behavior analysis and behavior analytic research where every week we pick a topic and discuss it at length. And this week is. You would be confused and think, maybe it's about going to various temporal fairs or maybe it's about gun safety. If you guessed it was about gun safety and safety skills. That's the one. It's about safety skills.

[A]

I mean, you need safety skills when.

[C]

You go to Renaissance Fair, too.

[A]

I've heard so.

[B]

I mean, they have swords, so you could do the same thing. If you find a sword just lying around, you need to not touch it, walk away. Go find the closest knight or king and tell them that the sword is there.

[C]

Nice.

[A]

And it's inside a stone.

[B]

Maybe a wizard. You can tell a wizard as well.

[C]

You could try to remove it from that stone.

[B]

No, no, Diana, no. That is not a safety skill. Leave that sword there. If you're a child, if you're some sort of adult, I guess you can try to take it out of this town. Yep, that's right. We're talking about safety skills, which we've done before, but I don't think we've ever done it. Just not. We've never talked about safety skills.

[C]

No. Well, in pairings, I'll tell you about the times that we've talked about because.

[B]

I feel like we've done this episode, have an episode called safety skills 300 something, and feels like it's got to be safety skills.

[A]

We have not. We have not. And that is why we have done it. I. Because this was my topic of choice.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And I was like, I never have topics, by the way. Way everyone. Mostly it's Diane and Rob who choose topics because I'm just like the happy, go lucky, show up girl. And I was like, I'm going to finally pick a topic that I'm interested in. And I looked back and we have not talked about safety skills.

[B]

We have. I. I could have sworn. At least we've done abduction skills.

[C]

We have several things that I will tell you about in.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

We've never had an episode called Safety Skills.

[B]

Wow. No. I knew we never had one with this title. I'm. I'm just shocked we made it this long without using this very, very basic title and very, very important concept of being safe in home environment. So we're going to be talking about what goes into safety skills training. We are going to talk about some examples of safety skills training, and we're going to wrap it up by giving kind of a summary of what should you use in safety skills. So, Diana, what articles will we be discussing today?

[C]

Well, that's a mighty fine question that.

[B]

I should have been prepared for whole bits, actually, more than to plan for that. Maybe three bits to plan for that.

[A]

Okay, well, let's tell you what a modifying question. Yes, he is.

[C]

All right, so we have several articles that we will at least tangentially touch on for today. And they include evaluation of behavioral skills training to prevent gunplay in children by Miltenberger, Flesner, Gatherage, Johnson, Satterland, and Egmo. That was in Java 2004. Also, effectiveness of video modeling and teaching earthquake and post earthquake evacuation safety skills for children with autism by Kurt Sevener and Cutlu. That was in Java 2023 or maybe 4. 2024 is the official date. Additionally, we will talk about teaching safety skills to children. A discussion of critical features and practice recommendations by Baruni and Miltenberger. That was in Behavior analysis and practice 2022. And not to be outdone, they also wrote a second article, a survey of safety skills training used by behavior analysts in practice, that was by Bruni and Miltenberger. It was published in Behavior Analysis and Practice, which seemed like a little bit of a gimme, but that was 2024. All right, well, he's really preaching to the choir there.

[B]

Let's kick it off a little. A little survey of what safety skills training is used by behavior analysts in practice in Behavior Analysts in Practice, as you just said.

[A]

So one thing I found really fascinating is that I still didn't know this, that the biggest threats to life include road traffic accidents, poisoning, drowning, and fires.

[B]

Did you know the guy who invented the Game Boy what died in a. In a very simple traffic accident where he got out to, like, check on someone, like a. Like a fender bender, and got hit by a car and died.

[A]

Oh, my goodness. So.

[B]

And he made the Game Boy.

[A]

Wow. He should have. He should have been like, Mario.

[B]

He could have jumped up.

[A]

Oh, all right.

[C]

There you go.

[A]

Jumps up. Anyway. Okay, so taste. I know. I'm so sorry. So, like, we all know some safety skills can be practiced on a daily basis, like crossing the street, right? Yeah. But some do not have many, if any, opportunities for practice, such as abduction. Right. Like, it's not that every child in the entire world faces an abduction, Right? So that only happens, hopefully none, if a few times. And it can be both physical, such as the presence of fires or guns or poison, or social such in. In the case of sexual abuse laws or abduction laws. So parents and caregivers are tasked with minimizing exposure to these potential threats, such as locking up their firearms, locking up their poisons. Right. Keeping an eye on their children in public. But it's also important to teach children what to do when and if they become in these situations. Right. And there's a few ways to do this. The first way is more like an informational program, and that's Pretty passive. It's just like, hey, kids, don't touch guns. Right. There's like a little cartoon out there that we would watch in like second and third grade where it's like, if you see a gun, don't do anything.

[B]

How come cartoons can make us buy toys but they can't teach us to not like touch things that will kill us?

[C]

I know.

[B]

They just work all the time.

[A]

They don't. Yeah, so. So fun fact. They don't work the informational programs when children watch them and then afterwards they get put in an in in situ assessment situation, which is like a natural environment, but the children don't know that it's happening. Right. They don't engage in the skills. So one thing we do know is, oh my gosh. Behavioral skills training, or BST, is an active learning approach and it's usually teaching. 3 responses that we'll all talk about. And I talked about it. Avoiding the safety threat by not making contact with it. If you see it, move away from the safety threat and then tell it a responsible adult about the safety threat. So you can use that for anything. You can use it for guns, poison, abduction, sexual lures. There's like all of the safety threats. Yeah, you can do the same type of procedure, which is kind of nice. And one thing about BST that everyone loves is that during training, children get the opportunity to practice so repeatedly and get feedback on what they'll do until they're. Until the skills are mastered, those three skills. But BST is not consistently effective for all participants. Sometimes we have to add in situ training, which is when they're in the in situ assessment. If they engage in the incorrect response, such as they touch the gun or they move away and don't tell an adult, then the in situ assessment now becomes the training. When adult pops into the environment and gives them feedback until they master it again. So BST and ISD have been proven to be effective when BST alone has not been effective.

[B]

So it's like one of those old GI Joe, the more, you know, things where they're like, hey, should I touch this down power line? And then like, hey, it's me, the sailor. GI Joe. Kids, you shouldn't touch a downpour. Wow, it's you. And then they tell them the thing.

[C]

Right.

[A]

So some limitations that we all know if we've ever done BST is that it's time intensive, resource intensive, and usually implemented by resources. And the authors could find no research that looked at safety skills run by practicing behavior analysts or rbts. So I'M sure it's happening.

[C]

Right.

[A]

But they, they come finding research to do it. So this is what this current study is going to look at the extent to which BCBAs, BCABAs, and RBTs use safety training skills. Safety skills training in their programming and if they use evidence based practice to do so. Right. Are they using BST? So the participants were BCBAs, BCABAs and RBTs and they had to work with the neurodivergent population. They were recruited by the BACB through the BACB email blast, professional organizations on Facebook, professional organization email blasts, Internet groups and word of mouth.

[C]

Can I just say how much I hate the phrase E blast.

[A]

E blast? Did I say that?

[C]

You said email blast.

[B]

I just mean it was in the article. It's not. You made it up.

[C]

Oh, I know. I'm not blaming you or them. It is the thing people say. But it's just like, yeah, so uncouth.

[A]

I love that. So the next time I write you an email and be like, this is just an email blast for you, Diana. Okay. So they actually don't know how many people received the opportunity to complete the survey.

[C]

Sure.

[A]

But 853 responded to the survey.

[C]

That's pretty good.

[A]

Yeah. When I looked at that, I was like, oh, that's kind of a lot. And one of their limitations, I said, is a small sample size relative to the BCBAs. And I was like, you guys are doing okay. Yeah, you're doing okay. So 17, 14 were selected, right? They selected, yes. To continue the study. That was the first question. Two selected. No. I love that. They open it and they're like, oh, I'm not gonna do this. And they actually answered. No, I just would have shut it down.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

And 137 did not complete the entire survey. What happened with those 137? Did they get bored? There's only 28 questions and they're mostly like, like hard scale questions. So I was just.

[C]

Because you're like, maybe I can do this in five minutes. And then you started it. You're like, I can't do this in five minutes. I'll come back. Right.

[A]

And they never.

[C]

And then they never connect.

[B]

Or maybe Chrome had to do that thing where you got to restart and like, ah, where to go? I can't find the link anymore. Oh, well, Right.

[A]

So they had a total of 695 when it was all said and done. Right. And they made the instrument themselves. They made questions based on their knowledge of safety skills. Then they put those questions in Qualtrex, which is a survey Internet platform Do Hickey and got feedback from other BCBAs such as clinicians and PhDs and at the end they made some changes on those and they had 27 selection based questions that include multiple responses and yes, no responses and one free response question. So the first question was consent to participate. If you said yes, you moved on. Then they had 12 questions related to the demographic data of the participants. 8 I wrote like cart scale questions about the importance of safety threats and reported client experiences. Seven questions about current safety threats and programming and the final question was a free response. So yeah it one thing that I like that they put out is that it was arranged in Qualtrex. So if you answered a question no and the rest didn't apply to you, the survey ended oh, that is. So if you were like an RBT and you didn't program you would only answer the first like handy 15 and then if you were like do you program? Then it would say no and then you wouldn't have to go through it.

[C]

Great.

[A]

So the survey received approval from the IRB and the BACB to be E blasted and recruitment was open for five months. So here are the results. 89% of the respondents lived in the U.S. they were white, they were female, they aged 21 to 30 and were active in the field for two to five years. Most were BCBAs but a close second was RBTs. Most had master's degree. Their primary role was implementing programs for clients. And then their secondary role. Right. The secondary most popular was developing and overseeing client programming. Most of them work with young children in a home based setting. So that was all the demographic information got through that very quickly. Then they asked them how they felt about the safety threat. Like do your clients have the safety threat and so or is it important? And all of them agreed or strongly agreed that there was a safety threat in terms of abduction, sexual abuse, poisonous substance, fire starting agents like I find matches or a firearm and they say that those were. They were. They strongly agree or agree. There must have been some that said that they did not agree that these were safety strets because the numbers are like four point something. So they said it is possible that someone said that it wasn't important. So that's fun. And then they asked the percentage of practice reporting that their clients have had the skills to respond safely to that. These are very low, very low. The highest is finding a fire starting agent. What do you do? That's 25%. Finding a poisonous substance was 24% but like experiencing a sexual abuse lure only.

[C]

12% so this is the practitioner's kind of guesstimating.

[A]

Wait, if they're client were in these situations, would they know how to handle it?

[C]

Yeah. Right, Right.

[A]

And so it's pretty low, like 12%. But that.

[C]

Yeah, I wouldn't expect it to be very high.

[A]

Right. Unless you're like, this is what I'm doing.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Right. So then they asked if the, the number of practitioners that reported the use of behavioral interventions to teach these safeties, and it's actually pretty high. Poisonous substance was 72%. So they were. That was promising for them. The lowest was firearm, which was 16%. And the authors posited that some states there's really strict gun laws or outside the United States, strict gun laws. Right. So that may not be a safety threat in their community. Right, Yeah.

[B]

I mean, poison safety. There are so many substances that could be ingested that would be poisonous. So that feels very much like almost every context would have a relevance for teaching that. Whereas like here in Massachusetts, unless a family were to say, like, we're really struggling with gun safety, I wouldn't even think about that as a problem that it, you know.

[A]

Right.

[B]

The children I, you know, worked with or supported would, would never run into.

[A]

Right. And it's important to note here that the num. Here is the num. The number here is 225 because it's all the people that have reported to use behavioral interventions, not the total number.

[C]

Oh, okay. That actually makes more sense.

[A]

Yeah. So then they asked them what type of behavioral interventions they used. And feeling good about this, behavioral skills trainings was up top at 67%. We have some discrete trial training, prompting, preferred reinforcers in the other, the most common other was social stories.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Not evidence based.

[B]

Probably not even animated.

[A]

Not even animated.

[B]

Not illustrated. There's no G.I. joe characters jumping out.

[A]

No good. So then when you look at when they're using behavioral skills training, where are they doing it? And most of they're doing it in the home. So 73% that it's doing in the client's home. Which makes sense. Right. Because if you're looking at all these things, they're not usually happening in a school.

[C]

Right.

[A]

You're not usually going to see a firearm in school, hopefully. And then they said at the center was the next highest, what, 38% in public or a private school was at 26%. An inpatient clinic was 4%. So, you know, other. They didn't give me another. So that was there. And then finally they asked what were some of the barriers to Using behavioral interventions for safety skills training. And the biggest barrier was concerns about liability, which is 40, 43%, which is huge. And this was interesting to the authors because they originally didn't have a question about liability. And one of the BCBAs who was looking at the question said, well, what happens if you do this and something goes wrong and the parent sues you? So that's fascinating. I never would have thought of that. Other barriers. The second one is lack of expertise. So this begs another question too, right? Like, are you not learning about BST in your graduate coursework? Right. It is not on the 6th edition task list, surprisingly.

[B]

That's very odd.

[C]

Right?

[A]

But it is in the supervisor curriculum. So if you've had the eight hour training, you would have been exposed to bst and everyone should be exposed to BST in their coursework now because you have to do the supervisor training modeling.

[B]

I mean, there's probably ways that, that folks would just sort of come into at least components of it.

[A]

Right? Yeah, so that, that one was interesting that they were like. And so other barriers include prior to the treatment of severe problem behavior, prioritizing skill acquisition for early learners, cultural concerns, having very young children, and then having the perception that teaching safety skills is the caregiver's responsibility, not the BCBA's responsibility. And so they said, huh? And they said, even though, you know, over 50% said that they were teaching, 55% they were teaching safety skills, 45 did not teach safety skills. And it's actually probably lower only because we don't know how many clients the person sees. Like maybe they use, they teach safety skills for one of their clients and not all of their clients. So. And they said, may one limitation is that they didn't ask any questions about in situ assessments or training. So maybe they did bst, but they never assessed whether it was effective or not. So that could be a limitation. They should have added that in. And so we know that people are doing it. They are teaching safety skills in their behavioral programming, but not a ton. And there are some barriers and concerns with doing that.

[B]

All right, so now we have a general sense of what's out, you know, what people are doing regarding safety skills and overall, some, some positive trends there. But for those of you, if you were in that minority group that was saying, I don't really know how to do that, or I haven't really done behavior skills training with safety skills, or I don't even, I can't imagine what it would be. Well, hold on tight, we're going to take A little break on the show, and when we come back, we're going to give you two examples of what BST and safety skills could look like. We'll be right back.

[A]

Hi. Do you want to be a bcba, also known as a board Certified Behavior Analyst?

[C]

Sure. We all do.

[A]

Now you can come to Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts to get your graduate degree just minutes outside of Boston.

[C]

Choose from any one of these Masters.

[A]

Of Science in Applied Behavior Analysis, Master.

[C]

Of Science in Special Education, dual degree in Special Ed and aba, or be.

[A]

Eligible for your postmaster's certificate.

[C]

You can complete your degree and be ready to sit for the exam in two years.

[A]

And our 2022 graduates had a 92% pass rate on the BACB exam.

[C]

Come enjoy approved fieldwork placements, ethics mini handbooks, PhD levels, professors, small class sizes, and a service trip to Iceland if interested.

[A]

And don't forget, our program is accredited by the association of Behavior Analysis International, or ABAI, as a Tier 1 master's degree program.

[C]

Don't delay. Supplies are limited.

[A]

Learn more at regiscollege.edu Again, that's www.regiscollege.edu regiscollege.edu. one more time, www.regiscollege.edu.

[C]

See you there.

[A]

Bye.

[B]

And we are back talking about safety skills. But before we continue our discussion of safety skills, I want to remind our listeners that ABA Inside Track is ACE and KWABA approved. And by listening, you're able to earn one learning credit. All you need to do is finish listening, then click the link in your podcast player to go to our website where you can enter in some key information, including secret code words. And the first of those code words I will do right now. So get ready. Are you ready?

[C]

I'm ready.

[B]

It's ham. H A M. I don't remember who wrote this one. Did I write this way back when.

[C]

Diana says, I wrote it gross.

[B]

Ham.

[C]

It was just the word that came to mind.

[B]

Okay. It's like some holidays you might eat a ham.

[A]

One time I had a professor, I went a teacher in high school that had ham fists.

[B]

Like really big fists.

[A]

You had really. You just couldn't see the knuckles.

[B]

And it just was like one we'd be ham fisted.

[A]

He said, I have ham fists. Okay, okay, okay. I don't know if that's a common thing. I've never heard it before.

[B]

Well, ham is all you need to worry about. All right, now let's continue on talking about safety skills. So when we last left off, we sort of discussed the general ways that most clinicians are Teaching safety skills, a lot of them using BST though some using other less effective methods. And one of the reasons that BST might not be used was, well, certainly liability, which we're not going to get into on this episode, but a lack of knowledge about how to teach safety skills. So here are going to be two examples that really cover what do safety skills training sessions kind of look like we're going to do an old one. Milton Berger, 2004. Looking at gun safety. It's kind of like the example.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And then we're going to look at a more recent one looking at earthquake and post earthquake evacuation safety skills and then there's a whole bunch in between. But I think these two kind of capture generally what safety skills training could probably look like for you. I'm going to do them one at a time though. We're going to have a lot of similarities. So I might bring up some of those right now. Certainly when it comes to safety skills, in terms of why would it be important to teach these? Well, in terms of gun safety, there were 141 kids back in back around when this article was written, the 2004 article was written, they were killed by accidental shooting. So it's not something that just, you know, is, is, is a problem only in some areas, like one death is one death too many. When it comes to kids playing with guns. However, at least in America, there are lots of places where having access to guns is approved. But that doesn't necessarily mean safety is always taught. So what could we do instead of there's been research looking at teaching 4 and 5 year olds gun safety and the rules are pretty similar. This article is going to look at teaching slightly older kids, gun safety 6 and 7 year olds. And it's going to play out what we saw in the survey, which is just telling kids, even if they have the ability and sort of the developmental awareness of hey, guns could kill you, they are not safe. Just telling them because they're older doesn't actually always and in most cases almost never teach the appropriate skills. So when it comes to gun safety, the skills are if you find a gun, don't touch it, move away from it and find a trusted adult to tell that there is a gun. In a previous study by Himle there, all these studies kind of were done using behavior skills training, which we'll talk about in detail. But the issue was if all you did was behavior skills training without that in situ training that Jackie, you were talking about from the survey study, the kids didn't really learn to engage in the skill. All of them, all of them didn't learn to engage in that skill consistently. So the thought was, well, let's look at 6 and 7 year olds and we'll do kind of a similar procedure. Now, behavior skills training you've talked about a lot on the show. You have some sort of rules, written rules, picture rules, it's a book, whatever you want the rules to be, but it's some sort of list of the steps that should be followed in the situation. The researcher, the adult, the clinician, whoever it is, should model those rules. You can label the rules or you can just model them as you're going through. Then you role play. So you have the child, you have whomever you're trying to teach engage in the same skills. You give them feedback, you give them positive feedback for correct steps and corrective feedback for incorrect steps so they know what to do again. And you repeat this over and over until they've reached some sort of a mastery criteria. And usually it's like run through the whole script, doing it perfectly twice in a row or something like that. In this case it was five, five consecutive, you know, perfect rehearsals in this study. And then sometimes that can be very effective in teaching skills, though it does not always work without the follow up part that we see in a lot of safety skills, which is the in situ training, which is the now that you've done it in the classroom setting or the practice setting, what if we did it in real life? So that's pretty much what they do in safety skills. There's some amount of the behavior skills training with whatever the skill is, and then there's some amount of less practice in real life later on. And then you repeat this with the feedback, with the training until you reach a mastery criteria. Typically at that point you do tend to see generalization. You do tend to see maintenance though, again, not always or not for all learners without some additional pieces we'll talk about, but for the most part that's what it's going to look like. I do love this line of research. I know you're the biggest fan of safety skills research, Jackie, but I love it too, because anytime someone's like here, do you want to read this new safety skills article? I'm like, you know what, I, I just want to see the details of what it is they're training. And I'm pretty sure the procedure is exactly the same one as I've seen in every other one of these. It's a, it's a variation on a Theme of BST and in situ training.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

So the end of the day, it's not that hard. Yeah, it's not that hard to do. Once you do it once or twice, you got it.

[A]

And then your expertise is like all safety. Right.

[B]

You go from 0 to 100% in one.

[A]

In BSD, you have to make sure they're being safe.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

So take it a while though.

[B]

Yeah, it can take a while. So in this example, we had a multiple baseline across subjects study where this, the children or the participants were entering a room with a disabled gun. They had the police involved. There was no chance of harm. And. Yes. And a parent or researcher would say something like, I gotta go somewhere. Here you go. And they leave them with a gun. They had a camera to see what the child did. And then again, they could score either a 0 because they played with the gun or anywhere from 1, 2 or 3, 3 based on which of the safety behaviors they did. If they never touched it but just kept hanging out, that's one. If they'd never touched it and left, that was two. And if they never touched it, left and found the adult, that was a full score of 3, which is what they were trying to get. No matter what they. They got. Thank you for, you know, not playing with it. Thank you for reporting it. So they started with a nice baseline where they'd sort of do these repetitions without any feedback. What does the child do? They had the BST sessions, which were only two 15 to 20 minute sessions for each of the participants. And then after which one, they do an assessment. If the child scored a three in that assessment. So that was like the role play situation. Great. If not, they do more booster sessions, two more booster sessions. And what they were is just like we talked about the instructions of what to do when you find a gun, modeling of what to do when you find a gun, rehearsal of what to do when you find a gun with feedback. And additionally they talk about the dangers of guns and, and you know, why these safety skills are important. So they did add a, a reasoning behind it.

[C]

There was a rationale.

[B]

A rationale was there. And then they'd say, hey, can you show me what you should do? Pretend it's your kitchen and you find a gun was like kind of one of the kind of paraphrase or quotations from the study. And they'd get praise if they are correct. And then they get, they get more instructions if they made a mistake. And they just do this and rehearse and rehearse with a gun in the different locations in that room until they got five consecutive sessions with all the correct safety responses. Now, if the child did not score three after those two additional booster sessions, so just with the bst, the child was not performing all three skills. They do the in situ training, and in this one, they would just take the mistake, turn it into training, and the trainer would surprise them. So it was very much like, we're joking with the G.I. joe, like, hey, I'm here to teach you about safety skills. Guns aren't safe for you, Dr. Miltenberger. You know, probably is what the kids said, Raymond. Yeah, and then they'd. They'd go through and they'd do the BST session again until they got the five consecutive correct rehearsals. And they'd sort of do this until they got, you know, three. There was one. One participant, Jake, who still wasn't doing it after in situ. So even though you read a lot of articles and you're like, bsd in situ, boom, slam dunk every time. You know, there was one child who actually needed an incentive. So if he could get a three, he would also get candy.

[A]

Yeah, it's 67% that it's affected with BST and in situ. So it's actually not 100%. But.

[B]

No, but we, we're only talking about it. Well, yeah, yeah. In this situation, we don't have a lot of participants here, so.

[C]

No, that's.

[B]

Oh, oh, sorry, sorry. From the, from the survey. My bad. So again, you might need to add extra incentives or some other. Some other practice. And again, the patterns they saw in the results were similar, kind of, kind of similar to the survey you had. In this case, 50% of the participants got a 3 just with BST. Two more were added to getting it after the in situ training. It was only one who finally did it when they would get candy for scoring a three. And they maintain their results in a five month follow up at their home, which was nice. So again, what we see here is kind of what we saw in the survey a little bit, is that you need to do some sort of safety skills training. It should probably involve bst, it should probably involve in situ training, and it should probably involve some sort of data collection, so you can make sure that those things did or did not work, which I could see with the gun safety being tricky because I don't know how I would. I guess you go to the police station and ask them to help you with that. That's what they did here.

[C]

I have no idea.

[B]

Like, hey, steady.

[C]

Amazes me whenever I read it like, how do they get permission to a real gun? It was not a pretend gun. It was a real gun that they were using.

[A]

I don't know how they got them to the irb. Can you imagine getting Matthew Iron Ra?

[B]

They'd be like a different time, man.

[C]

Huge props to Dr. Miltenberger that he was. He's like, this is a real problem and I'm going to frickin solve it.

[A]

Yeah. And it is a real problem. It's still.

[C]

It is absolutely a real problem. And so just I am interested to know like if. If it's the same now as it was then because it's 20 years later.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And one thing I noticed from my own childhood and then yesterday, Rob, from going to your childhood home is how many guns are just lying around for their toy guns. Oh yeah, they look real.

[A]

They were lying around when I was ran.

[C]

Well, I did too.

[A]

But my dad put it in the closet, but it was not locked. He's just like, if you touch this closet, I will spank you.

[C]

It's a huge issue.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But like he could have gave me candy. If you don't touch this closet, I will give you candy.

[A]

But Eric never had to spake me.

[C]

Found like immediately found all these real, very real looking guns yesterday.

[A]

They played with them.

[C]

Of course they did. Yeah.

[B]

They immediately pointed them at each other and shot. Bang, bang, bang.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[C]

And I don't know, I feel like the access to the fake look, real looking fake guns is perhaps lower now than it was before. But they were immediately enticed to grab those things.

[B]

That's why we needed those GI Joes the more, you know, cartoons back in the 80s because everything looked like a real gun all the time. And they were like, it's too hard to make them not look like real guns. What if cartoons and then you have to buy the toy that told you not to play with the gun. It was win, win.

[C]

I don't. I think it's still a very real problem today. So I'm not trying to say that it's not. I am kind of curious though, if they're.

[A]

I don't know, it still is a problem. Right. Because there's tons of school shootings and tons of accidental shootings, but we don't know the difference.

[C]

Yeah, you didn't. I don't know if you cat started off with your 2021 statistic here. Did you, Rob?

[A]

No.

[C]

142 kids killed.

[B]

Oh, I did. I mentioned that. Yes. Okay. I thought I had a typo in My years, though, so I didn't specify the. The year.

[C]

Oh, okay. But that's a recent statistic, so that's obviously still a problem.

[B]

Oh, all right. So. But the nice thing about safety skills and this sort of BST institute package, you can do it with things other than gun safety. So if you're like, I don't know how to make my guns safe enough for training, there's plenty of other disasters in the world that you can be a part of supporting safety skill training. So let's move into this Kurt et al. Study from 2024 on earthquake and post earthquake evacuation safety skills. And as much as you say, well, earthquakes and guns are very, very different, you would be right. However, the training procedure that you can use is relatively similar. The big difference between this study and the gun safety study, other than earthquakes versus guns, are this study used video modeling as their kind of their BST package rather than just sort of, you know, in vivo bst, which can be very helpful. We've talked about the importance of video modeling. But the nice thing, if you do a video, you've got it forever. It looks the same, it's consistent. You could even try something like self video modeling. They did not do that in this study where the. But you could have that where the student is part of the video that they could watch on their own that their family could watch at home. Right. There's a lot of positives to using video modeling, and we knew it can just sometimes be fun to watch a video versus, you know, as much fun as Dr. Miltenberger I'm sure would be to do all of these demos. Maybe you can't get him. He's not always available to be in your. In your safety skills model. Model session.

[C]

Do you need Dr. Miltenberger himself to do the in situ Boston?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, it would be.

[C]

You might.

[B]

No, they didn't. He wasn't in this study, so. Okay, I'm pretty sure you don't need him.

[C]

Yeah. To be there, but video alone is not always going to be effective.

[B]

No, we didn't do video alone. Diana, slow your roll. We got some studies, so. I've never.

[C]

I don't. I've never lived in earthquake territory. So what do you. What are you supposed to do?

[B]

Well, I'll get to that. Earthquakes are dangerous. We're aware of this.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

They're dangerous.

[B]

And even though there are lots of improvements in terms of how buildings are built in certain areas, we are able to track some of those, you know, fault lines and whatnot with earthquakes. It's still very important that you minimize your risk of injury and certainly death by the fact that even if things are built to certain codes that make them resistant to earthquakes, you are still talking about the earth moving, which means that there will be things falling. Especially if you're inside a building, things are going to fall down, and you need to be prepared. So what do you do? You drop. You cover yourself using your hands, if you can. You hold on to something. You hold on. You cover your head and neck, and you hold on to a shelter. Like, usually you're kind of under a table, or you go up against an interior wall and you hold on to the legs. Yeah. You kind of like, hold on. Because the biggest fear when an earthquake starts is that something will fall on top of you.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Then once the earthquake is done and things have stopped falling, then you have to evacuate the building, go outside, because the building could have just. It just barely made it through the earthquake, and it could fall at any minute, or there could be aftershocks that continue. And you'd rather be outside in an earthquake than inside, but you can't be outside in a really quick.

[A]

Well, yeah, I guess, because you just be like, whoa.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, the earth could open up. And that's like a movie thing. That's not. That's not typically.

[C]

What, different than a tornado.

[B]

Yes. So you want to be outside, but you don't know that you should be outside because an earthquake's coming, because the earthquake will have happened wherever you happen to be.

[C]

Right. So unless you can communicate with birds.

[B]

I guess you could do that as well. So. And I. I did love some of the, you know, in addition to injury, if you don't respond correctly, it's possible that people panic and they shove into each other. They try to get down the stairs and push each other. So it's very important that everyone knows what should you do in an earthquake? So it's not just what to do in the moment, but it's also what to do after the earthquake. There was a study, and I can't remember if I just read this study and had shared it around as an alternative that we were looking at in one of the school district I worked in, or if we ever taught, I don't think we talked about it, using VR for fire and tornado safety behaviors. But in this case, in this case, they decided, let's just look at the video modeling, because it's a lot cheaper than making a virtual reality app. So they looked at video modeling for earthquake safety so an individual could Just watch a video of someone demonstrating all those target skills. Get down on their hands and knees, cover their neck and head, hold on to a wall or table. In this case it was like a desk or a table because it was in a classroom. And then once the earthquake has stopped, single file line, walk outside. That's, that's that.

[A]

There you go.

[B]

The participants were three children in Turkey with an ASD diagnosis between 9 and 10 years old. They could follow vocal instructions. They attended divisional and auditory stimuli for at least five minutes. They can imitate gross and fine motor skills, and they were able to wait in a space for up to two minutes. So again, they had the, you know, at least the prerequisites to following the rules around earthquake safety. In this case, you have a teacher and a different 10 year old boy who would do that. We were in the video. The teacher gave sds, it's time to do, you know, get down. It's time to put my hands over my heads. Right. And they'd filmed it in the classroom of the participants. This is where they did, you know, the whole research. So the videos were in the space that was then practiced in. Yeah. Which probably makes sense is realistically, if you're making a video model, you're probably making it in the space. You will then be teaching it.

[A]

This is an office building, but disregard the building. Just pretend it's a classroom.

[B]

Exactly. You probably don't have a green screen or a big movie studio to do your video model. So just do it where you're going to teach it. That sounds good to me. Then when they would practice, the teacher would just give a target stimulus, an earthquake is happening. Then they would follow through with the steps of covering their necks and heads, getting down, holding onto the table, either the teacher table or the student's desk. Then after that had gone on for a period of time, the teacher would say, earthquake is over. We're getting in line and going downstairs carefully. They get up, they line up behind the teacher at the front of the room. They'd walk calmly and quickly out of the building to a specific meeting area that had been predetermined. And then really the dependent variable here was what percentage of the correct responses in that chain of events did the participant engage in both during the simulated earthquake. Well, sorry, it's not even a simulated earthquake. During the cue that there was an earthquake that then did not happen. And the cue of what to do after an earthquake if they made a mistake. One of the differences here is they watch the video, then they do a probe Similar as you would do in a lot of video modeling treatment plans, if you made a mistake, they just stopped the probe. They'd score the remaining steps as, as a zero, as minuses or whatever the score was. And then they could do feedback and move on. There's a multiple probe design across participants. And we have our baseline where they just did the probe. There's an earthquake happening. What I'm hoping they gave them more instructions than just randomly saying there's an earthquake happening and wondering what happens. I wouldn't know what to do if someone just said there's an earthquake and we're kind of just standing around, done this. Like, what do you. I don't think so. Are you sure? I'd say. And they just sort of would present the stimulus and wait and then they'd kind of end it. I do. Like when you have these baselines where it's like, look, we're going to wrap this up because clearly it's not happening. Let's not belabor the point of lying about earthquakes occurring. Right. The then they would move on and kind of, they moved on to the other section. So they do the video modeling session where the participant watch a video once with their teacher. They get praised for watching. And then later on they do a probe where they'd remain in that. And they remained in this phase where they'd watch the video, do the probe until they were able to engage in all five steps for three consecutive sessions. And there were some, you know, times that they would change. So for example, the hold under the table could go from five to 15 seconds before they said it's time to go outside. And they had kind of a five second delay. So if nothing happened from the queue to the next step in the chain for five seconds, they'd say, hey, that's, that's done. They'd call the rest of it minuses. And they just say, we'll work on this later. Again in baseline, they'd work on it later. And if they completed all the steps during the probes, they could earn a sticker. And then they did some generalization sessions. So again, not a lot of feedback, just the video and just the practice after generalization sessions were the same as the baseline, except they practiced this in the school library and they did a follow up one in four weeks later after each of the participants met criteria. One of them wasn't able to do the generalization due to Covid. A third one wasn't able to. So they didn't get as much data on maintenance as they wanted to have. And then they did a social validity survey with the participants. It was a modified version for the participants and one for parents and teachers with some kind of closed and open ended questions similar to the gun safety study. You kind of got similar results in terms of how quickly the skill was learned. One participant reached 100% correct in all the steps after watching the video three times and then doing their pro. Sorry, they watched it six total times and they did like, you know, the probes after each time. So it was like three total sessions. They generalized the skill to the library and they had maintenance after one and four weeks. So pretty quick in terms of how long this participant took to learn the skill. Another one kind of showed a gradual increase as they would watch the video model and as they practice the skill and then, you know, either follow it or not follow it. Took 7 total watches of the video and you saw maintenance and you saw generalization for at least a week maintenance and then one kind of @ a stepwise trajectory where they learn a couple skills, then stop and learn a couple skills and stop. But after nine watches, they were able to engage in the skill in both the classroom and the library. They did not get a maintenance probe for that participant. The social validity was all pretty good. Everyone said safety skills are important. Everyone said they felt the children had learned the skill. There was some concern about why are you running so many baselines in the social question, which is fair. And everyone generally liked the participants at least said they liked the videos that they were watching. So we've got two kind of general ways. I would say video modeling and behavior skills training are not quite the same because there's no feedback. You can do feedback plus the video modeling. In this case, they did not. So it does seem that sometimes you can just use video modeling rather than behavior skills training to do the skills. But you know, again, you're starting the same. There's some sort of a visual component. The child has to watch the skills happening and then have a chance to engage in the skills.

[A]

And that might be scary. Some, you know, that might be scary. Depending on the skill, right?

[B]

So depending on the skills, you could try without the feedback. I honestly would probably just throw it all together if I could. But for something like this, where there's no danger happening, there's no actual earthquakes occurring, maybe you just try the video modeling. But something like gun safety. You're right, Jackie. I probably wouldn't just be like, let's watch this video anyway, I'm leaving. There's a gun hidden in here. Somewhere. I wonder what happens. Yeah. So. So maybe mileage will vary as to which one you would want to use, but they. They capture a lot of the same kind of components. Again, some big questions always on video modeling is, who can learn from video modeling? Like, what are the prerequisites? There's not, like, a lot of consensus as to if you can do XYZ, you can do video modeling effectively.

[A]

The McDonald and all. 2015 article 2014. Oh, I was close, though, and I didn't look. You were.

[B]

And also in this study, it was very fake. Things weren't falling all over the kids. There were no special effects. So would they engage in these behaviors if there were an actual earthquake?

[A]

Oh, no. Foam rocks.

[B]

I mean, you're hoping the teacher would have the same response of, like, there's an earthquake, rather than, oh, my God, we're all gonna die. Which they were not trained to respond safely to that one. So I don't know how that would work. I think.

[C]

I don't think that's how the teacher would act.

[B]

You would hope not. But again, we didn't talk about, like, we don't know what SDs they might use in an earthquake. What would say, oh, whoa.

[C]

All right, I do have one question here.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

So we're talking about BST and video modeling. How come for all of us, stop, drop, and roll was such an effective.

[A]

I can tell you. I watched the video, and then we practiced. I remember, in gym, because it was the most fun, Right. They showed the fun video, and then everybody went to the gym, and they're like, all right, everyone, stop, drop, and roll. So we practice. So that's basically bsd.

[C]

We practice, too. Now that you. Now that I.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Reflect on.

[B]

Kids love to fall on the ground and roll all over the place.

[C]

Yeah. And then, like, so maybe we. It was basically like bst. Basically.

[A]

It was like that video. I remember it was like a fun character. And they're like, when you ever get blown up in a fire and you've got fire on your.

[C]

I remember.

[A]

And the guy was like, who I never saw.

[C]

We didn't have a video.

[A]

Oh, we had a fun video.

[C]

Firefighter come.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

Well, we were, too, I guess. We didn't have firefighter.

[B]

We taught that. We taught in our. In our Cub Scouts. We taught stop, drop, and roll, but.

[A]

Right, because. But we did practice.

[B]

Yes, we did the practice.

[A]

Everybody practiced.

[C]

Everyone loved it. Do you think that's the key?

[A]

I do think it's the key, to be honest.

[C]

There has to be a practice catchphrase.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

Which I think is important too. But I'm gonna touch on that when I.

[B]

It's easy to remember. And again, so we know that these things work. We know BSD can work. We know video modeling can work. There might be times it does not work, times you might want to use one or the other, but they kind of have that same component. Like you were saying, Diana, there's some sort of here are the rules for what to do in situation and here's you doing them. Whether I showed you or you watched a movie, here's you doing them. But let's take a little time, let's say for our dissemination station, let's move into it and do this last article.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Because it's all about what are the critical features and practice recommendations, which is what we do here in dissemination station. Yeah.

[C]

Or sometimes you talk about areas for future research. But I thought that this article fit well here. So our.

[B]

Let's do both. Why not?

[C]

Our friends from Article 1, Baruni and Miltenberger have also provided us with this summary where they discuss, as Rob said, the critical features and practice recommendations for teaching safety skills to children. And we've covered a lot of these components already. But so this really is kind of a wrap up. They want us to know a couple of things. First of all, the across the board inclusion of some type of in situ training seems to be pretty important. They say that we really need to have this piece present in order to mimic real life. And you really and truly want to have it be a scenario that seems as real as possible without an adult, trusted adult in the room. Because that's like the giveaway that it's not real. So they say you really do want to set this up as much as you can to be real and have it operating like an in situ opportunity, just relying on verbal report, like tell me what you would do if there was a. If the fire alarm went off in your house. Right. Or doing role play are not as reliable because the sedu correspondence between those situations is just not as strong. And really creating a real, as real as you can scenario is the best bet. They also then talk about the effectiveness of training and make a comparison between informational approaches and active learning approaches. And so the informational approach is where you're just watching a video or someone is lecturing to you and there's no rehearsal and feedback component. Those have been compared to the other types that we've discussed here today. The, the bst, the in situ, the video modeling, et cetera. And time and again Information only loses out. It does not prove to be as effective as those other types. And there's a classic example, we didn't review it today, where they compared the gun safety BST as established by Miltenberger and this other video like packaged school program. I think it's called Eddie the Eagle is. Do I have that right? Eddie the Eagle.

[A]

I actually watched that video when I was in.

[C]

Oh, really?

[A]

Yep.

[C]

Nice. And they compared the two and kids did not learn as well with Eddie the Eagle. So that's like a, a good, a good one to go back and look at if you want to check that out. So they compared that with the active learning approaches, which are the ones that include rehearsal and feedback. Those are more effective, hands down. So if you want to teach a safety skill, you should plan to have it include rehearsal and feedback. You can call it whatever you want to, right? You can call it BST or in situ or one of these other things, but those pieces need to be there, whatever you end up calling it. So they say the critical features here, the child needs to have a chance to practice the skill as presented with the simulated threat. The child is given praise for the correct performance and they're giving corrective feedback until the skill is performed consistently. They have multiple opportunities to practice until they get it right. Sometimes BST isn't alone, isn't effective, and in situ training is added on afterwards as like the next level of training. So there's several examples of that being necessary, but it's not always. It depends. And in rare cases, as you touched on Rob, if neither one is successful, then adding in the tangible reinforcer egg, the skittle, or the M and M or whatever it was that got everybody over the finish line. They also say you could also try virtual reality, which is one that we didn't touch on today, we've talked about in the past. It's another effective component as long as you still have the rehearsal feedback options. And then the other things they mentioned is make sure you're taking data. You got to have those data and find ways to program and promote generalization and maintenance within your study and afterward. Multiple exemplar training is a great way to approach this. They also mentioned you could mediate generalization or, you know, build that in. And one way you could do that is by having participants describe what they're doing while they're in training. And then, you know, with the hopes that that's going to generalize afterward. It may be that the institute training is part of the generalization plan. So you May need to have that type of, you know, basically probe, real life probe to see if generalization is going to occur in the setting that you need it to be in. And then of the studies that they looked at, many of them did have a maintenance measure. And of the ones that did so, it was like 70% did. And of the ones that did mostly maintenance was pretty good, but they didn't. Most of them weren't looking at it for super long term. So usually it was like one or two months out, which again, nothing to sneeze at there. None of them went past a year. So do we know if these are long lasting, durable behaviors, given that the opportunity to practice them in real life is usually slim to none? We don't necessarily know. So there's something to think about. And then they mentioned that accessibility of training is important. We don't know a ton about how we might train parents to teach these skills, what it looks like to train the trainer to teach these skills. Can peers be involved in safety skills training? There's limited research on those things, and there's also limited research on training individuals with disabilities. This is one area in our field where we tend to see more research conducted with neuronormative peers, and that is an area for expansion in the safety skills research. Certainly many of these issues that we've discussed here regarding safety skills could be of even greater impact for individuals with disabilities who may have more difficulty in discrimination of dangerous situations. So that's certainly important. They said of the, of the studies that had looked at that, they very often included what they called enhanced BST that was effective. And the enhancements are like totally things that we would be like, well, yeah, of course you do those things. Right. It's like prompting and prompt fading and additional tangible reinforcement and video modeling like you covered too, Rob. So all of those could be enhancements that for us are kind of part of. Yes, those are the way that we train things, which would not put the learning of these safety skills outside of the realm for an individual with a disability at all. It's just maybe we want more research to show like, what. What might be best practice in terms of adding those enhancements. So, yeah, those were their recommendations.

[B]

Beautiful. Well, now we have a pretty good sense of what we should do. I mean, we kind of knew this because we've talked about similar topics before or worked in this. But if you are on the fence about, I don't think I know how to do this. I mean, if you've never done bst, find someone who has done BST and work with them on sort of like maybe some simpler skills and then you could add it to some non dangerous safety skills. If you've done BST a bunch, probably in your supervision, I would guess, then you should be good to teach at least some like kind of low level, low risk safety skills in concert with families or the school you work with. And you can use these, these articles as well as some of the other ones to sort of have a sense of what they might look like in terms of video, in terms of your script. But bare minimum, it's just a level of practice and a level of modeling and a level of feedback and then thinking about the generalization. All right, Diana, you want to wrap us up with the pairings? Just keep, keep it going.

[C]

Yes. All right. Well, pairings is the part of the show where I tell you about past episodes in our library that you might want to check out if you found this one interesting. And as promised, we have touched on safety skills in a variety of contexts. Previously, we just never had an article that was, I mean, an episode that was just called safety skills. But we have talked about relevant topics in the following episodes. Episode 194, where we talked about abduction prevention. Episode 132, we did a component analysis of behavior skills training. Episode 15, we discussed technology and safety skills training with Dr. Nick Vanslow, episode 25, virtual reality, and episode 93, virtual reality training with Dr. Bergland Svensbjorn daughter and Dr. Casey Clay. So. And there may be others, but I think I hit on the big ones. You do?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay, very good. And now our snack. We always have a snack as well to go with this episode. So just like the last time I did this with you, Rob, this snack is a little bit of a riddle and I want you to try to figure out why I'm recommending it. So the snack for today is as follows. Three ingredients. Apple seeds, raw kidney beans, and some forest fungi.

[B]

Well, the theme is these are things you don't want to eat because they're poisonous. Because they're poisonous. That's right.

[C]

They're poisonous.

[B]

Apple seeds have low levels of cyanide. Forest fungi, I mean, there are some that you could certainly eat, but if you are not trained in which ones they are, are. Could be. Could be very poisonous, hallucinogenic, or just deathly. Yeah, I don't know. I never heard. Raw kidney beans are not to be eaten.

[C]

You cannot eat them.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

I don't remember now why I looked it up. Here. I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you what it is that's in them.

[A]

I wonder what you were doing over there. Shellfish. I saw.

[C]

Yeah, a toxic called. Oh no. Why did I say I was going to say this? Phytohemaglutinin.

[B]

Oh yes, Phytohem glutenin. I don't want any of that.

[C]

No, no, no, thank you. You don't want it. So cooking kidney beans makes them safe.

[B]

You want a video model for that one because then you only have to say phytoheda glucose. Right. One time and then it's good forever.

[C]

There you go. So we didn't touch on it today, but there are, there is some research out there of identifying poisonous substances that falls within this umbrella of safety skills training as well. So these weren't the things that they had to identify there. But no, no, no, don't eat any of these snacks.

[B]

Okay, great.

[C]

And that's it for pairings. Please enjoy.

[B]

All right. Thanks Diana. And thanks everyone so much for listening to ABA Inside Track. We really appreciate it. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the show on your podcast, player of choice or wherever you like to get us. We're a lot of places, including on YouTube. You can find our new episodes every week. You can go to our website abainsidetrack.com to find links to all of the articles that we have discussed today as well as all of our back catalog as we talked about in pairings as well as many other episodes. If you like ABA InsideTrack and you want to support us, there's a couple ways to do that. One would be subscribing, certainly the other would be subscribing on Our Patreon page, patreon.com abainsidetrack where you can subscribe at any level, even a free tier to gain access to our polls to gain access to episodes a week ahead of time. But if you subscribe at the five dollar level, you gain access to our listener choice episodes with a free CE for listening and you get a little bit more say in which episodes we do there. We actually have a listener choice episode coming up pretty soon on transitions.

[A]

You are in November.

[B]

In November. You also can join at the $10 and up level to get access to our two hour long book clubs with book club guy Alan Haberman, which we do once a season. Those come out on the free feed eventually, but if you want them right away as well as 2 CES for no additional charge, then you want to join at that book club $10 level again, that's patreon.com/aba inside track. And of course, some other thanks. We want to thank Dr. Jim Carr for recording our intro and outro music, Kyle Sturry for interstitial music, and Dan Thabot of the podcast Doctors for his amazing editing work. And one thing he's not going to have to edit in is our last secret code word, which is anchovy. A N C H O V Y. It's a little fish, like a Caesar salad you could put on a pizza. Which I was always told speaking of 80s cartoons was the worst thing you could ever have on a pizza. You know what? Anchovies are pretty good. So the only thing that I think was wrong about our 80s cartoons and I wasn't the violence, it wasn't the toy advertising.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

It was the anchovy pizza. Like, wrong. What are they thinking? What else might they have gotten wrong? Who knows?

[C]

Anchovy broccoli got a really bad wrap, I feel.

[B]

See, broccoli on pizza I don't love because there's like a weight component. It's like too heavy.

[C]

Pizza in general.

[B]

Oh no, broccoli is great. What are you talking?

[A]

I love broccoli.

[B]

What do you talk about? All right, well, that's the end of the show. We'll be back next week with another fun filled episode.

[C]

Until then, end of the show.

[B]

Keep responding. Bye.

[A]

Bye.