BA400 Unit 10 Applied Concepts Integration Paper Example

One Tuesday in Kevin's Life, in the Language of Behavior Analysis: A BA400 Unit 10 Applied Concepts Integration Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA400: Foundations of Behavior Analysis

Unit 10 Applied Concepts Integration Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the group home, the resident and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles and books cited are real.

Why a Whole Day

I spend most of my working week with the same four residents, and Kevin is the one I know best. This course taught concepts one at a time. In a real day, they happen together. This paper follows Kevin, a 29-year-old resident with autism and limited speech, through one Tuesday in October, naming each event with the term that fits it and, where useful, the term it might be confused with.

Morning

At 6:30, Kevin's alarm sounds. He startles, a brief tensing and blink, which is an unconditioned respondent elicited by a sudden loud sound. The alarm is also a discriminative stimulus for getting out of bed, an operant behavior reinforced over years by the routine that follows, including breakfast.

Kevin's morning routine is a behavior chain: a sequence in which each response produces a stimulus that reinforces the previous response and serves as a discriminative stimulus for the next (Cooper et al., 2020). Turning on the shower produces running water, which signals stepping in; stepping in produces warm water on his skin, which signals reaching for soap, and so on. Staff taught the chain with a task analysis and picture schedule two years ago, and he now completes it with only a check from staff at the end.

At breakfast, Kevin eats quickly and asks for more toast by saying "toast." That word is a mand, controlled by a motivating operation, food deprivation after a night's sleep, and reinforced by toast. Laraway et al. (2003) would describe the overnight fast as an establishing operation, increasing the value of food and evoking food requests.

Midday

At 8:15, the van arrives to take Kevin to his day program. At the program, he sorts mail for the building, a job he is paid for every two weeks. During the morning, he notices a dog outside and says "dog," and a staff member answers, "Yes, a brown dog." That word is a tact, controlled by the sight of the dog and reinforced by social attention, not by getting a dog.

The same day contained two kinds of saying a word: "toast" to get toast and "dog" to share what he saw.

At lunch, the program's staff ask Kevin to wipe the tables. For the first time, he hands the staff member his break card instead of shouting. The card had been taught only at the group home, where shouting at the dishwasher had been maintained by negative reinforcement, escape from the task. Using it at the program, without training there, is generalization across settings and people. Stokes and Baer (1977) would credit at least two strategies: the card itself is a common stimulus Kevin carries, and staff at the group home had trained loosely, with different staff and tasks.

Afternoon

Back at the house at 2:45, Kevin begins checking the mailbox every half hour or so, hoping for a magazine. The mail arrives at an unpredictable time, so the first check after its arrival is reinforced: a variable interval schedule, which produces his steady checking (Ferster & Skinner, 1957).

At four, staff ask Kevin to unload the dishwasher. He hands over his break card after one rack, takes two minutes in his room and returns to finish. His old shouting, once maintained by escape, is now on extinction, because shouting no longer ends the task, while the card produces a break after some work, an alternative response that serves the same function.

Around 4:30, Kevin rocks in the living room chair while listening to music. No one attends to the rocking, it occurs whether or not people are present, and it stops when he is busy with his hands. Staff consider it likely to be maintained by automatic reinforcement, the sensory consequences it produces, and since it harms no one, it is not a target.

Evening and Night

At dinner, Kevin says "juice" and gets juice, another mand. Afterward, he watches a cooking show and says "apple" when one appears on screen, a tact, the same word class he learned to match in print during his reading program.

At nine, staff dim the living room lights, a discriminative stimulus for going to his room, built through years of a consistent bedtime routine. Kevin brushes his teeth, another short chain, and goes to bed.

Terms Easily Confused

Writing the day out also showed where terms are easy to mix up. The alarm is both an eliciting stimulus for a respondent startle and a discriminative stimulus for an operant, getting up; the same sound has two functions. Kevin's "juice" at dinner and his "juice" while watching a commercial would look identical on a tally sheet, but one is a mand and the other a tact. And the break card's success at the day program could be mistaken for a new skill learned there, when it was a skill from home appearing in a new place. Each pair shows why the course insists on identifying the controlling variables before choosing a label.

What the Vocabulary Adds

Describing a day this way can sound cold. But each term did something useful. Naming the dishwasher behavior as negatively reinforced changed staff's response. Separating mands from tacts changed how Kevin was taught to ask. Recognizing a variable interval schedule explained his mailbox checking without labeling it obsessive. Noticing that the break card generalized to the day program showed the team that their training had worked. Baer et al. (1968) asked that applied behavior analysis be conceptually systematic, its procedures tied to basic principles. A day like this shows what that looks like in practice.

The vocabulary also has limits. It does not capture everything about Kevin: his sense of humor, his love of trains, the way he lights up when his sister visits. Skinner (1953) would say those, too, are behavior with histories, but no single day's analysis could describe them fully. The terms are tools for understanding and helping, not a replacement for knowing the person.

Conclusion

One Tuesday in Kevin's life contained nearly every concept from this course: respondent startle, an operant chain, discriminative stimuli, establishing operations, mands and tacts, negative reinforcement replaced by a functional alternative, extinction, a variable interval schedule, automatic reinforcement and generalization across settings. Naming them precisely explains why Kevin's day unfolds as it does and shows where staff can help, while leaving room for the person the terms describe.

References

Baer, D. M., Wolf, M. M., & Risley, T. R. (1968). Some current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1(1), 91-97. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1968.1-91

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Laraway, S., Snycerski, S., Michael, J., & Poling, A. (2003). Motivating operations and terms to describe them: Some further refinements. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 36(3), 407-414. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2003.36-407

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and human behavior. Macmillan.

Stokes, T. F., & Baer, D. M. (1977). An implicit technology of generalization. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 10(2), 349-367. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1977.10-349