James Edward Carr

Behavior Analyst Certification Board

In recent years, behavior analysts have increasingly used the term behavior science to describe the discipline behavior analysis. These “rebranding” efforts have not been concentrated in any particular domain of behavior analysis and appear to be decentralized in nature. We analyze the possible reasons for using this alternative term and describe s...

There is a common misconception in applied research that generalizations from a study to a specific client can only be made with a large sample size. In single-case design research, however, generalizations are made from a line of replication studies rather than from a single large-N study. In this brief tutorial, we summarize how generalizations a...

The performance criterion (also known as the mastery criterion) is the operationalized performance standard that behavior must reach before instruction ceases, changes, or becomes focused on other goals, such as stimulus generalization and response maintenance. Although performance criteria are widely used in skill-acquisition research and practice...

The Performance Diagnostic Checklist - Human Services (PDC-HS) is an assessment designed to assess the environmental variables contributing to employee performance concerns in human-service settings. Recent research has demonstrated that interventions indicated by the PDC-HS result in improved employee performance across several human-service setti...

Rosenberg and Schwartz (Behavior Analysis in Practice, 12, 473–482, 2019) criticize a number of aspects of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board’s Professional and Ethical Compliance Code for Behavior Analysts and propose, as an alternative, a decision-making process for evaluating the ethicality of behavior under a particular set of circumstanc...

There is a substantial literature on how to deliver feedback to change performance. However, to date no research has been conducted on teaching employees how to effectively receive feedback, even though employee behavior during a feedback session could moderate the effects of feedback. Thus, we developed a list of skills that should be exhibited by...

There has been dramatic growth in the number of trained behaviour analytic practitioners over the last decade across the world. The growth in the profession has led to the need to identify individuals who have met specific criteria for professional credentialing either through government regulation (e.g. licensure) or private certification (e.g. by...

Mainstream research design in the social and behavioral sciences has often been conceptualized using a taxonomy of threats to experimental validity first articulated by Campbell and his colleagues (Campbell & Stanley, 1966; Cook & Campbell, 1979). The most recent update of this framework was published by Shadish, Cook, and Campbell (2002), in which...

The number of practicing behavior analysts who hold Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) certification has substantially increased in the past decade. Some have mistakenly interpreted the BACB’s certification requirements as being specific to the autism and intellectual disabilities practice area. We present key BACB requirements, describe h...

Discrete-trial teaching is an effective teaching procedure that must be implemented with high integrity to produce optimal learning. Behavioral Skills Training (BST) has proven effective for staff training; however, BST is time and labor intensive. Computer-based instruction (CBI) programs may provide a more efficient and cost-effective alternative...

There exists a terminological problem in applied behavior analysis: the term frequency has been used as a synonym for both rate (the number of responses per time) and count (the number of responses). To guide decisions about the use and meaning of frequency, we surveyed the usage of frequency in contemporary behavior-analytic journals and textbooks...

As in other disciplines, women were underrepresented in behavior analysis in its early decades. Over the years, multiple articles have documented increasing trends in women’s representation in behavior analysis in areas such as contributions to the scholarly literature and participation in professional associations. The purpose of the present artic...

The need for a credible professional credential became apparent early in the history of applied behavior analysis. The first efforts to develop a system that identified behavior-analytic practitioners having a specified level of expertise in the profession began in the early 1970s. Over the years, a number of credentialing initiatives were develope...

Treatments based on applied behavior analysis (ABA)—an applied science of human behavior—have been increasingly recognized in public policy, both at the federal and state levels. Despite this recognition, however, the relative newness of the science often raises questions about the nature of the treatment approach and the qualifications and regulat...

Traditional approaches to the study of distraction have involved evaluations of the effect of a stimulus on specific task performance, but without a conceptual analysis of how the stimulus might actually interfere with the specific task. In the present study, we evaluated the potentially distracting effects of various classes of stimuli that were r...

Demand for behavior-analytic services has greatly increased in recent years, resulting in the development of many new graduate training programs. The purpose of the present study was to identify frequently assigned readings from the course syllabi of behavior-analytic training programs with the highest pass rates on the Board Certified Behavior Ana...

Past research has demonstrated that pictorial preference assessments can predict subsequent reinforcement effects for individuals with developmental disabilities only when access to the selected stimulus is provided contingent on a pictorial selection. The purpose of the present investigation was to assess more comprehensively the feasibility of th...

Applied behavior analysis has grown considerably as a profession in recent decades, an assertion that is supported by numerous metrics. In the USA alone, dozens of state laws have been enacted to fund behavior-analytic treatment (Autism Speaks, 2016) and regulate behavior-analytic practice through licensure (Association of Professional Behavior Ana...

Dymond, Clarke, Dunlap, and Steiner's (2000) analysis of international publication trends in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) from 1970 to 1999 revealed low numbers of publications from outside North America, leading the authors to express concern about the lack of international involvement in applied behavior analysis. They suggeste...

The Performance Diagnostic Checklist (PDC) has been used in a number of investigations to assess the environmental determinants of substandard employee performance. Carr et al. (2013) revised the PDC to explicitly assess the performance of employees in human-service settings who are responsible for providing care to others: the Performance Diagnost...

We analyzed past volumes of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior (TAVB) to provide a comprehensive status update after 30 years of publication. Data on TAVB's content, frequent contributors, and scholarly impact suggest a healthy state of the journal.

In this study we examined the disparities in content of six behavior analytic journals (Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, The Psychological Record, The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, Behavior Analysis in Practice, and The Behavior Analyst) in five popular academic databases (PsycINFO, ERIC, Web of...

Practicing behavior analysts frequently assess and treat problem behavior as part of their ongoing job responsibilities. Effective measurement of problem behavior is critical to success in these activities because some measures of problem behavior provide more accurate and complete information about the behavior than others. However, not every meas...

Dixon et al. Behavior Analysis in Practice 8:7–15, 2015 evaluated the scholarly productivity of instructors in graduate-level, behavior-analytic training environments as a potential quality metric related to practitioner training. In our reply, we discuss the authors’ premise and methodology, suggest alternative conceptualizations, and recommend a...

In recent decades, behavior analysts have generally used two different concepts to speak about motivational influences on operant contingencies: setting event and motivating operation. Although both concepts still appear in the contemporary behavior-analytic literature and were designed to address the same antecedent phenomena, the concepts are qui...

Applied behavior analysis (ABA), the application of the principles of behavior to problems of social significance, relies on peer-reviewed research to establish and confirm the effectiveness of practical procedures across a wide variety of applied areas (Baer et al. 1968). These areas include, but are not limited to, the assessment and treatment of...

We evaluated the effects of multiple exemplar instruction (MEI) on the relation between listener and intraverbal categorization repertoires of six typically developing preschool-age children using a nonconcurrent multiple-probe design across participants. After failing to emit intraverbal categorization responses following listener categorization t...

This annotated bibliography summarizes journal articles on verbal behavior published outside of The Analysis of Verbal Behavior, the primary journal for scholarship in this area. Seventeen such articles were published in 2014 and are annotated as a resource for practitioners, researchers, and educators.

Previous research has demonstrated that the conditional-only method (starting with a multiple-stimulus array) is more efficient than the simple-conditional method (progressive incorporation of more stimuli into the array) for teaching receptive labeling to children with autism spectrum disorders (Grow, Carr, Kodak, Jostad, & Kisamore, 2011). The cu...

The standards associated with high-stakes professional credentialing are well established in the field of testing and measurement and are well supported by antitrust, administrative, and contract law. These standards have evolved to assure that the scope of work for a field’s practitioners is appropriately reflected in the content of credentialing...

To meet the appropriate standard of care for their clients, practicing behavior analysts must stay in close contact with the scholarly literature. As one step toward this important goal, we provide an annotated bibliography of recent articles that are deemed to have relevance to behavioral practitioners in the area of developmental disabilities.

Although conditioned reinforcers are used in many behavioral intervention programs for individuals with developmental disabilities, little research has been conducted to determine optimal methods for establishing conditioned reinforcers. An early method that has received relatively little research attention is to condition a neutral stimulus as a d...

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to complete a systematic evidence-based review of published behavioral treatment studies employing single-case designs with both children and adults with acquired brain injury. Peer-reviewed journals were searched using PsycINFO, Medline, and ERIC databases with combinations of terms such as brain injury, behav...

Behavioral parent training has proven effective in improving the skill performance of foster caregivers and biological parents of dependent children during role-play assessments. To date, however, no studies have examined the impact of behavioral parenting skills training on child placement outcomes. We conducted a quasi-experimental archival analy...

The PDC-HS implicated a lack of proper training on participant duties and a lack of performance feedback as contributors to the performance problems. As a result, an intervention targeting training on participant duties and performance feedback was implemented across eight treatment rooms; the intervention increased performance in all rooms. This p...

LeBlanc, Crossett, Bennett, Detweiler, and Carr (2005) described an outpatient model for conducting intensive toilet training with young children with autism using a modified Azrin and Foxx, protocol. In this article, we summarize the use of the protocol in an outpatient setting and the outcomes achieved with a large sample of children with autism...

The present study was conducted to determine whether elevated response rates that occurred in an experimental functional analysis were correlated with higher post-session response rates in the natural environment. Functional analyses indicated that the problem behavior of four children with developmental disabilities was maintained by common source...

The extensive clinical activity occurring in the area of early and intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) for children with autism represents a promising opportunity to conduct research on clinically relevant problems and on effectiveness and efficiency of various procedures. However, many practitioners providing these services may not have recei...

Primary objective: To extend previous research on alternative stimulus preference assessment (SPA) modalities to individuals with severe ABI by evaluating the effects of pictorial, verbal and tangible item presentation. Research design: Paired-stimulus procedure used for SPA sessions with the order of modalities counterbalanced across participan...

Mands sometimes are taught using the question "What do you want?" as a supplement to the required features of the mand relation: an establishing operation and a related consequence. Although verbal prompts have been used during mand training, they also may result in undesirable stimulus control. However, no direct empirical evidence exists to suppo...

Discrete trial teaching (DTT) is a common instructional method incorporated into intensive behavioral intervention programs for children diagnosed with autism. Errorless learning strategies are frequently recommended during DTT because they often result in more efficient and effective instruction. The purpose of the present study was to conduct a s...

Discrete trial teaching (DTT) procedures have proven effective in teaching language to children with autism. Discrete trial teaching uses a highly structured, fast-paced format of instruction that is typically conducted in a one-to-one situation at a desk or table with minimal distractions. We compared this traditional model of DTT to a version of...

Research on functional response classes has applied significance because less severe forms of problem behavior have been found to co-occur with more severe forms. In addition, the most severe forms of problem behavior are sometimes targeted for intervention without monitoring other less severe forms. In such cases, it is unknown whether and how unt...

Tact training is a common element of many habilitative programs for individuals with developmental disabilities. A commonly recommended practice is to include a supplemental question (e.g., "What is this?") during training trials for tacts of objects. However, the supplemental question is not a defining feature of the tact relation, and prior resea...

Descriptive praise has been recommended widely as an important teaching tactic for children with autism, despite the absence of published supporting evidence. We compared the effects of descriptive and general praise on the acquisition and maintenance of intraverbal skills with 2 children with autism. The results showed slight advantages of descrip...

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is a picture-based alternative communication method that is widely accepted and utilized with individuals with disabilities. Although prior studies have examined the clinical efficacy of PECS, none have experimentally evaluated its manualized training structure. We experimentally evaluated the effect...

The interpolated reinforcement procedure (IRP) involves the deliberate continuous reinforcement of a previously intermittently reinforced behavior prior to implementing extinction. Basic research on the IRP has produced equivocal findings, and applied research has suffered from methodological limitations. The present study was an evaluation of the...

We review recommendations for sequencing instruction in receptive and expressive language objectives in early and intensive behavioral intervention (EIBI) programs. Several books recommend completing receptive protocols before introducing corresponding expressive protocols. However, this recommendation has little empirical support, and some evidenc...

Many early intervention curricular manuals recommend teaching auditory-visual conditional discriminations (i.e., receptive labeling) using the simple-conditional method in which component simple discriminations are taught in isolation and in the presence of a distracter stimulus before the learner is required to respond conditionally. Some have arg...

The rich technology of stimulus preference assessment (SPA) is a product of 40 years of experimental research. Basic principles of reinforcement and a modest empirical literature suggest that high-preference stimuli identified via SPA may enhance treatment efficacy and decrease problem behavior more effectively than less-preferred stimuli. SPAs can...

We examined whether typically developing preschoolers could learn to use a problem-solving strategy that involved self-prompting with intraverbal chains to provide multiple responses to intraverbal categorization questions. Teaching the children to use the problem-solving strategy did not produce significant increases in target responses until prob...

It has been suggested that verbally sophisticated individuals engage in a series of precurrent behaviors (e.g., covert intraverbal behavior, grouping stimuli, visual imagining) to solve problems such as answering questions (Palmer, 1991; Skinner, 1953). We examined the effects of one problem solving strategy--visual imagining--on increasing respons...

An annotated bibliography that summarizes the On Terms articles on behavior-analytic terminology from The Behavior Analyst is provided. Thirty-five articles published between 1979 and 2010 were identified, annotated, and classified using common behavior analysis course-content frameworks.

The current study extends the literature on teaching mands for information by assessing whether mands generalize across different establishing operations (EOs). Three children with autism were taught to perform multiple behavior chains, 3 of which included a common response (e.g., "Where is the spoon?") used for different purposes. An interrupted-b...

The differential outcomes procedure was evaluated during conditional discrimination training with three children with autism. Linking specific reinforcers to specific target responses did not produce large or consistent improvements in training efficiency compared to a nondifferential outcomes procedure. The results are discussed in the context of...

Behavior analysts are obligated by the conventions of the academic discipline and guidelines of professional conduct to stay in close contact with the scholarly literature. However, a number of variables can interfere with this obligation. We discuss several barriers to searching the literature, accessing journal content, and making contact with th...

The substantial demand for behavior-analytic treatment of early childhood autism has been associated with rapid dissemination of treatment procedures to practitioners and caregivers. This level of demand could plausibly induce premature dissemination of treatments that do not yet have sufficient empirical support. We argue that this might have happ...

We taught 3 children with autism to raise a hand or keep both hands down depending on their status (e.g., having heard a target word, possessing a specific item) using modeling, prompting, and reinforcement. All 3 children acquired accurate hand-raising skills in response to progressively more difficult discrimination tasks during group instruction...

We evaluated a multiple schedule in which the extinction (S-) components were signaled overtly by a black lanyard and the reinforcement (S+) components were not correlated with any programmed stimuli in developing stimulus control over the high-rate social-approach responses of an adult with mental retardation. Responding was consistently low in th...

The purpose of this series of experiments was to evaluate the effects of mixed mand-tact arrangements on the acquisition of mands and tacts in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, the effects of three training arrangements (mand-only training, tact-only training, and mand-tact training) were investigated with 3 typically developing children. R...

Escape from instructional activities is a common maintaining variable for problem behavior and a number of effective treatments have been developed for this function. Each of these treatments has characteristics that make them optimal for certain environments and clients, but less optimal for others. We summarize the most commonly researched functi...

Three children with autism were taught abduction-prevention skills using behavioral skills training with in situ feedback. All children acquired the skills, which were maintained at a 1-month follow-up assessment. In addition, 1 of the children demonstrated the skills during a stimulus generalization probe in a community setting.

The present study investigated the effects of contingency-specifying rules and a token economy to decrease the latency to comply with academic instructions by a 16-year-old girl with acquired brain injury. Results showed that treatment was successful in reducing academic response latencies. These results replicate previous research in which differe...