BA440 Unit 3 Antecedent Intervention Paper Example

Before the Pot Boils: A BA440 Unit 3 Antecedent Intervention Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA440: Behavior Intervention

Unit 3 Antecedent Intervention Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the agency, the families and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

Changing What Comes First

Most behavior plans families have tried focus on consequences: what happens after a tantrum or a refusal. Antecedent interventions change what happens before. They alter the conditions that make problem behavior likely, such as a long stretch without attention or a hard demand delivered cold. Because they prevent rather than respond, they can reduce problem behavior quickly and are often easier for families to accept.

In my role as an in-home technician in Spokane, I carry out antecedent strategies designed by my supervising behavior analyst in two of my cases this year. This paper describes three strategies, the evidence behind each and what happened when we used them.

Noncontingent Attention for Mateo

Mateo, five, has tantrums while his mother cooks. Assessment showed they were maintained by her attention. Vollmer et al. (1993) compared noncontingent reinforcement, in which attention is delivered on a fixed schedule regardless of behavior, with differential reinforcement of other behavior for participants whose self-injury was maintained by attention. Both reduced the behavior, but noncontingent reinforcement was easier to carry out and produced fewer side effects such as bursts of problem behavior. When attention is freely available, the motivation to earn it through problem behavior declines.

We set a kitchen timer to ring every three minutes while his mother cooked. Each time it rang, she turned, knelt and spent about twenty seconds with Mateo, admiring his blocks or asking about his truck, before returning to the stove. Tantrums were not ignored, because the plan for them was still being developed, but the timer ran regardless of what Mateo was doing.

In baseline, Mateo had tantrums on four of five evenings, averaging eleven minutes. In the first two weeks with the timer, tantrums occurred on one of five evenings and lasted under three minutes.

Three minutes was short enough that Mateo never ran out of his mother, and long enough that dinner still got made.

The schedule will be thinned gradually, moving to four, then five minutes, as long as tantrums stay low. His mother noted that the timer also reminded her, in a busy kitchen, to look up.

High-Probability Requests for Jonah

Jonah, eleven, refuses homework, and his refusal is maintained by escape. Mace et al. (1988) studied behavioral momentum in the treatment of noncompliance: delivering a short series of requests a person is very likely to follow, such as "give me five" or "touch your nose," immediately before a request he is unlikely to follow. They found that compliance with the low-probability request increased when it followed the high-probability sequence, and that the time between requests mattered.

Before each worksheet, his mother now asks Jonah three quick things he almost always does: hand her a pencil, read the title of the sheet aloud and point to his favorite problem. She praises each, then presents the first problem within a few seconds. In baseline, Jonah started the first problem without arguing on two of ten evenings; with the sequence, he started on seven of ten.

Choice for Jonah

Kern et al. (1998) reviewed research on choice as an intervention to improve behavior. They found that offering choices, such as which task to do first, which materials to use or where to work, often reduced problem behavior and increased engagement, even when the total amount of work stayed the same. The effect seemed to depend partly on the value of control itself.

Jonah now chooses the order of his two homework subjects and whether to use a pencil or a marker. His mother was skeptical, since the work was the same, but argument episodes fell from an average of three per evening to one in the two weeks after choice was added to the high-probability sequence.

Why Antecedent Strategies Work and When They Do Not

All three strategies change the motivating operation, the condition that makes a reinforcer more or less valuable. Frequent attention reduces Mateo's motivation to seek more; easy requests and choices reduce how aversive Jonah's homework feels at the start. That is also their limit. Antecedent strategies reduce the likelihood of problem behavior but do not teach a new way to get what the behavior produces, and if problem behavior still works when it occurs, it may persist.

For that reason, both children's plans pair antecedent strategies with other components. Mateo is learning to ask "Mama, play," and Jonah earns breaks for finished problems. The antecedent strategies give those skills a chance to develop with fewer episodes in the way.

Context and Family Fit

Antecedent strategies must fit a family's evening. Mateo's family cooks a large meal most nights and often has relatives visiting; the timer had to be loud enough to hear over conversation, and his grandmother learned to respond to it too when she cooked. Jonah's mother works days and helps with homework while tired; the high-probability sequence takes less than a minute, which made it practical. A strategy that requires a calm, uninterrupted hour would not survive either home.

Choosing Among Antecedent Strategies

Function guided which strategy went to which child. Noncontingent attention suits attention-maintained behavior because it delivers the maintaining reinforcer freely; for Jonah, free attention would have done nothing about escape, and free breaks would have meant no homework at all. High-probability sequences and choice suit escape-maintained behavior because they make the demand itself less aversive. My supervisor also considered demand fading for Jonah, starting with very short worksheets and lengthening them, but his teacher's assignments were fixed, so the team chose strategies that changed how work began rather than how much there was.

Measuring Fidelity

I checked whether each strategy was carried out as written. On the evenings I was present, Mateo's mother responded to the timer within ten seconds on most rings, and Jonah's mother delivered the full sequence before most worksheets. When fidelity slipped, it was usually because a sibling needed attention, a reminder that plans live in busy homes.

Conclusion

Three antecedent strategies reduced problem behavior before it began. Noncontingent attention, supported by Vollmer and colleagues' findings, cut Mateo's tantrums while his mother cooked. A high-probability sequence based on Mace and colleagues' work and choices supported by Kern and colleagues' review helped Jonah begin homework with fewer arguments. Because antecedent strategies do not teach replacement skills, each plan pairs them with reinforcement for new behavior.

References

Kern, L., Vorndran, C. M., Hilt, A., Ringdahl, J. E., Adelman, B. E., & Dunlap, G. (1998). Choice as an intervention to improve behavior: A review of the literature. Journal of Behavioral Education, 8(2), 151-169. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022831507077

Mace, F. C., Hock, M. L., Lalli, J. S., West, B. J., Belfiore, P., Pinter, E., & Brown, D. K. (1988). Behavioral momentum in the treatment of noncompliance. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 21(2), 123-141. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1988.21-123

Vollmer, T. R., Iwata, B. A., Zarcone, J. R., Smith, R. G., & Mazaleski, J. L. (1993). The role of attention in the treatment of attention-maintained self-injurious behavior: Noncontingent reinforcement and differential reinforcement of other behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 26(1), 9-21. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1993.26-9