Targeting Efficiency: The Effects of Video Modeling and Feedback on Instructors’ Acquisition and Generalization of Behavior Analytic Skills

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) is a highly effective, evidence-based treatment for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. Low treatment integrity could greatly compromise the delivery of effective ABA interventions, but instructors who hold no formal training make up the larger portion of employees within the special education field. Designing efficient and effective training for these employees is important because schools have limited resources for caregiver training. This study used a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across three novice ABA instructors to evaluate the effects of a training protocol consisting of video and in-vivo modeling and feedback, a training algorithm, and multiple exemplars training on the acquisition of five ABA procedures (i.e., discrete trial teaching, multiple stimulus without replacement, echoic mand training, stimulus-stimulus pairing, and graphing percentage data). After the instructors mastered these skills the experimenter also evaluated if instructors’ showed generalized teaching skills when implementing novel ABA procedures. The results showed that the training protocol was effective in increasing instructors’ treatment integrity on all five procedures up to mastery criterion as well as producing some generalized teaching skills. The implications of these results are discussed in light of creating more efficient training protocols for ABA settings