BA430 Unit 3 Goal Selection Paper Example

Eleven Possible Goals, Three Chosen: A BA430 Unit 3 Goal Selection Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA430: Behavior Assessment

Unit 3 Goal Selection Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the cooperative, the student, the family and every rating are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

Eleven Goals on a Whiteboard

Brynn's team met in October in the small conference room of her rural middle school. Her mother, her special education teacher, the speech therapist, a paraprofessional, my supervising behavior analyst and I listed every behavior anyone hoped to change. The school's list was long: stop tearing worksheets, stay in the classroom, finish work independently, raise her hand, stop humming during tests, and more. When the list reached ten, her mother asked to add one. She wanted Brynn to be able to tell someone when she was tired or did not feel well, because Brynn's sleep apnea left her exhausted some mornings and she had no way to say so except by leaving the room.

Eleven goals were too many. Selecting among them was the assessment task for this unit, and it required a method more principled than taking the first three on the board.

Criteria for Selection

Bosch and Fuqua (2001) proposed that target behaviors be evaluated as possible behavioral cusps, behaviors that open access to new reinforcers, contingencies and environments. They listed five criteria: access to new reinforcers, contingencies or environments; social validity; generativeness, meaning the behavior leads to other new behaviors; competition with inappropriate responses; and the number and importance of people affected. A behavior meeting several criteria is likely to produce change well beyond itself.

Wolf (1978) argued that goals should be socially valid, meaning that the people affected judge them important. A goal chosen by the professionals alone may be technically sound and still unwelcome or useless in the person's life.

The only goal on the board that Brynn could use outside school was the one her mother added.

Rating the Goals

I rated each goal against the five criteria with my supervisor, scoring each criterion from zero to two, and asked Brynn's mother to rate how much each goal mattered to the family on the same scale.

Telling an adult she was tired or unwell scored highest. It would give Brynn access to rest breaks, a nurse visit or a change of task, which are new contingencies. It would compete directly with leaving the room and tearing worksheets, if those behaviors served to escape work when she was exhausted. It was generative, because a simple request for a break could grow into other requests. And it affected many people: her teachers, her mother and Brynn herself. Her mother rated it two of two.

Staying in the classroom scored well too. It would keep her in instruction and in contact with peers, and it competes with leaving. Finishing work independently scored moderately; it mattered to teachers but less to her mother, who rated it one of two. Raising her hand and not humming during tests scored low on most criteria; they mattered mainly for classroom convenience and affected few people beyond the teacher.

The Cultural and Practical Context

Brynn's family lives on a ranch forty minutes from school, and her mother works early shifts. Goals that required a long daily data log at home were unrealistic. Fong et al. (2016) emphasize that culturally responsive goals reflect a family's routines and values, not only their stated preferences, and that practitioners should ask how a goal fits daily life. Brynn's mother valued independence on the ranch, where Brynn helps feed animals; a request for a break, she said, would also help there when Brynn became overwhelmed.

Practical factors also mattered. A goal needed to be measurable by teachers during ordinary instruction. Telling an adult she was tired could be recorded by frequency on a simple tally sheet; staying in the classroom could be recorded as minutes absent.

The Three Goals Chosen

The team selected three goals. First, Brynn will use a break card or a short phrase, "I need a break," to request rest, with a target of using it before leaving the room on at least four of five occasions. Second, she will remain in the classroom during instruction, with minutes out of the room as the measure. Third, she will complete short work tasks with breaks available, beginning with five-minute tasks.

Tearing worksheets was not chosen as a direct target. The team expected it to decrease if the escape it might serve was available through a request, a hypothesis the functional assessment would test. Raising her hand and humming were deferred.

Brynn's Own View

Wolf's argument applies to the student as well as the family. With her speech therapist's help, I asked Brynn which of three picture cards she liked: a break card, a classroom picture and a finished worksheet. She chose the break card and said "rest" twice. Her preference cannot settle the goals alone, but it gave the team confidence that the first goal mattered to her.

Explaining the Goals Not Chosen

Deferring goals can feel like dismissing the people who proposed them, so the team explained each decision. Her math teacher had proposed raising her hand, and he worried that Brynn's call-outs disrupted others. We agreed to record call-outs informally for a month; if they rose, the goal would return at the next review. The humming during tests bothered a single substitute and no one else, so the team dropped it. Finishing work independently was folded into the third goal in a gentler form, short tasks with breaks, rather than full worksheets without help. Writing a sentence beside each deferred goal on the rating sheet, giving the reason and the date it would be reconsidered, helped the teachers accept the list. It also gave Brynn's mother a record she could bring to the next meeting.

Reviewing the Goals

Goals selected in October may not be right in March. The team agreed to review them at each quarterly meeting with the same rating sheet, so that a goal can be dropped, added or changed if Brynn's needs or the family's priorities shift. If her sleep apnea surgery goes ahead, for example, the need for rest breaks may decline.

Conclusion

Eleven possible goals narrowed to three when each was rated against Bosch and Fuqua's cusp criteria and the family's own ratings. The goal her mother added, telling an adult she was tired or unwell, scored highest on access to new contingencies, competition with problem behavior and social validity. Wolf's case for social validity and Fong and colleagues' attention to family routines kept the selection grounded in Brynn's life outside school.

References

Bosch, S., & Fuqua, R. W. (2001). Behavioral cusps: A model for selecting target behaviors. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 34(1), 123-125. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2001.34-123

Fong, E. H., Catagnus, R. M., Brodhead, M. T., Quigley, S., & Field, S. (2016). Developing the cultural awareness skills of behavior analysts. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 9(1), 84-94. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-016-0111-6

Wolf, M. M. (1978). Social validity: The case for subjective measurement or how applied behavior analysis is finding its heart. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 11(2), 203-214. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1978.11-203