An Evaluation of the Emergence of Untrained Academic and Applied Skills After Instruction With Video Vignettes

Applied behavior-analytic skills are derived from precise, technical, objective operational definitions and exemplars of natural phenomena. In some cases, technical behavior-analytic terminology can be challenging for students and practitioners to learn and apply given a person's individual history with the concepts. One of the conceptual areas of behavior analysis that learners tend to struggle with more than other areas is the functional account of human language or verbal behavior. We used an emergent-responding training protocol with freely available and easy-to-implement web-based learning tools to teach the terms and definitions of Skinner's taxonomy of verbal operants using video exemplars and mixed response forms to six graduate students. We also tested for the emergence of untrained applied clinical skills in the form of collecting data while watching novel real-world video exemplars. We found that the video-based training system reliably resulted in the emergence of untrained responding and generalization to novel stimuli and responses and that the skills were maintained by four out of six participants for 2 weeks. In addition, the applied skills performances of the participants were comparable to students who received traditional training in verbal behavior, slightly lower than the performances of Board Certified Behavior Analysts, and considerably lower than the performances of doctoral-level BCBAs. When compared to other published research that used emergent-responding training protocols, the current study required more training time on average but resulted in better performances during some maintenance probes. A brief conceptual analysis of our data is presented, as well as recommendations for future research.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-020-00140-3.