B (56:50)
I don't love it though. It kind of. It's kind of like, why don't you think of that second one? Couldn't you think of that second one first? Just put it all together. Now I got to read to two studies. Come on. The boringest part of research is hearing all the descriptions of your IOA procedure and your participants and your materials don't care. Want to get to the procedure, want to get to the results and discussion. So shame, shame, shame, shame. But anyway, let's see what we got here. It could have been worse. At least the study was interesting. At least the topic was valuable. So we have three preschool age children with a disability who were learning in aba. It was an ABA school Model. And I think sort of, you know, knowing that this is an extension of the Greer procedure, I'm wondering if it's more of like the educational component of like how to do aba, so more of like a, you know, using the principles of ABA in education rather than like what I originally when I think of that, I think, oh, like D CT and incidental teaching. I think this was more of just like using principles of behavior more tied into kind of traditional general education type procedures. But at a preschool. They don't get into too much detail about it. All of their participants were at a pre listener or pre speaker level of verbal behavior based on the early learner curriculum and achievement record assessment. They mostly pointed as their communication method. They had a history of behavior improving when reinforced by praise and social reinforcers, which was good to know because that's the only social reinforcer that's going to be delivered in this procedure. They had interest in looking at pictures and objects and they were able to sort of orient and follow vocal directions related to gaining attention, like hey, look at me or let's go over to the table. And they could match stimuli with gestures and cues. Again, all of this being important in that this is a different group than the 2006 Sion Greer study which used typically developing preschoolers. These are children with disabilities. So will this same procedure result in the same change? They had a couple different settings they ran this in because they were both looking at, hey, can we make book engagement increase as well as, hey, does anyone care about books when there's a lot of other cool preschool toys around? So the study was done either at a table as well as at a preschool area that had like a bookshelf with a lot of books. Preschool age books on things like cars and colors and animals. You all know those preschool books. Simple, simple, one picture, I'm guessing, per page. And also a toy shelf with puzzles, cause and effect toys like a toy farm, little blocks, little chairs and everything. And those are sort of the distractor items to some extent. Although they weren't programmed to be distractor items. They just were present throughout. They were looking at the measure of book engagement through a whole interval recording method where you'd have these five second intervals broken into a five minute total observation. And they kind of score this during a free operant probe. How much is the child looking at the book versus how much are they making contact with other items in the environment? They also would have to have physical contact with the book for some of these probes. So again, if it was with the researcher, I think there was a little bit more room for not making total contact, but they wanted them holding the books as well as looking at the books. And they were seeing, can we get book engagement to like a 90% across that, that sampling method across a number of sessions. All right, so different procedures being used here. They had a preference assessment to make sure to see if there was a preference for book relative to other stimuli, which they did at the table and they did in that free play area. They did it before the intervention and after the intervention to see, hey, are books preferred? More so than they originally were. They did a reinforcer screening where they identified stimuli that would be used as reinforcers throughout the free operant engagement preference assessments. Then they did a reinforcer assessment with that with mastered instructional readiness tasks like go over here or come over here. So again, that's how they determined what their social reinforcers were going to be. And then the main dish, the intervention itself, you sat at a table with the child, the child had a bunch of books. And they set up a number of trials. Trials, about 20 trials in which they combined continuous reinforcement with a persistence test in which no reinforcement was delivered. So basically, if the participant was engaging with the book for one second, they would begin the continuous reinforcement, five seconds saying, you know, praise or engaging in their social reinforcement. During that time. If the child stopped engaging in that five second block, they stopped the trial. Then they prompted the child to, you know, get back and engage with the book by labeling items in the book, by pointing at pictures, by modeling, turning the pages. And they use least to most prompting if need be, you know, first pointing, then a partial hand direction to the book. And once the child was re engaged with the book, they restarted that five second reinforcement component. Once they got five seconds of book engagement with the continuous reinforcement, they did the persistence test, which just was five seconds. But they didn't do anything. They just kind of let the child engage or not engage. They did this for 20 trials and that was it. That was the intervention. So, for example, for a trial to be scored as successful, you'd have, you know, the child getting the book for a second, five seconds, where they're looking at the book, they're getting continuous reinforcement of that social reinforcement being delivered. And then five seconds with no reinforcement with the child continuing to look at the book. You could also have had one second, then three seconds with a continuous reinforcement, then some time where they needed to sort of prompt them to engage with the book again, then five seconds with the continuous reinforcement, and then five seconds at the persistence test. So really, the persistence test was the key component, and you could have as many kind of fail little continuous reinforcer five seconds as need be until you got five seconds of continuous reinforcement and book engagement. And then five seconds, you know, nothing. No, no reinforcement, just engagement. Once you saw that the children were engaged in eight for at least 18 of those 20 trials with five seconds of book engagement during that persistence test across two consecutive sessions or one where they just loved the books and they always looked at the book during those persistence tests, they'd repeat the free operant probe at the table. If the child was successful at the table in terms of choosing books over other items, they do it at the. At the toy area. And if they didn't, well, they go back and do intervention, and they just increase the interval to 10 seconds pretty much of continuous reinforcement. And they did the whole thing across a concurrent multiple probe across their three participants. So what were the patterns we had here in experiment one? Well, we had Jackson, who didn't really engage with books when there were toys available. During the free operant probe, he did two rounds of the intervention in which the second round, it was the 10 seconds of continuous reinforcement, and they did see an increase in book engagement both at the table and then when placed in the toy area with books. And that maintained for four weeks after the experiment was over. And there's only a slight decrease when they looked again seven weeks later. So Jackson was into books. Now, Mike had a little bit of book engagement during that initial free operant preference assessment in the toy area, but not at the table. He also had two rounds of the intervention and again, increase in book engagement across both of the settings and maintenance up to seven weeks. So Mike also really loved booksnow. Benjamin a little bit of engagement more so than the others. To start, he only took one round of intervention before engaging in more book book engagement than other item engagement, and that maintained up to seven weeks for maintenance. So Benjamin really loved books. All right, so what does that tell us? Well, certainly using this procedure is pretty easy and effective means to increase book engagement with preschoolers, and in this case, preschoolers with disabilities. So we know children with and without disabilities. This can be an effective, effective procedure. What they weren't sure about, though, was, yeah, but was there, like, a direct effect of reinforcement at play here, or was it that the books had actually become conditioned reinforcers? So was it just enough, you know, pairing of the new behavior with the continuous reinforcement that, like, yeah, I just. I do books because I get all this great condition reinforcement and it sort of carried over. Or was it books are now conditioned reinforcers. So here's experiment two, where we sort of just, hey, what if we also added a reinforcement assessment of books with previously mastered responses? Would we see an increase in those responses? Because the kids love the books and they function as a reinforcer. They also said, you know what, how many times did we have to do that sort of start and stop continuous reinforcement procedure before we got to five full seconds? And does that add a significant amount of time to this procedure? So it looks really good on paper, but in reality it takes like a thousand trials.
