Guest Post by: Sarah Kupferschmidt, MA, BCBA
Technology is changing quickly and in amazing ways. My partner, Nancy Defina-Marchese and I, created Special Appucations Inc., so that we could develop educational apps using Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) to teach children with developmental disabilities. ABA has given us the tools to be able to teach effectively and efficiently which is so important for many young learners…it is all about maximizing the learning opportunities! There are so many things to consider when teaching a new skill or concept. Things like how to present your instructions, including how you present your discriminative stimuli and comparison stimuli, how to deliver reinforcement for correct responses, and how and what to do when there is an error, just to name a few! The literature is clear on many of these aspects on how to implement effective teaching. In this blog I wanted to share just five of the ways that we incorporated ABA into our app to teach language to children with disabilities. Check out the app at specialappucations.com, it is called ABA Find it! and see if you can find the many other ways that ABA is maximizing learning potential!
Here are 5 ways you can use ABA in an app to teach language:
1.Presentation of the array of stimuli.
We made sure that on every learning trial there were a minimum of 3 stimuli/pictures in every array. What this means is that if the student was working on learning to identify a picture of a pig, there would be two other comparison stimuli on the screen (i.e., a cow and a horse). As the student progresses through the app the array becomes more and more complex (i.e., 3 to 9) until the final level where the array consists of 9 images on a screen. In the final level, the 9 images are actually placed in a natural scene in order to promote generalization. At no time was a student expected to learn a new target with only one picture on the screen.
2. Varying the target stimulus.
We started out by teaching in sets of 3. If we stick with the previous example of the pig, the cow, and horse, then on any given learning trial we would be teaching one of the three animals and the remaining two would be comparison stimuli. For example, for trial one, we might present the horse, the cow, and the pig on the screen and say, “Touch the horse.” We would move the images around and then ask them to touch the cow while keeping the horse and the pig as the other images on the screen. We never inserted a novel image at the time of teaching.
3. Placement of target stimulus.
In the design of the educational app we made sure that we randomly selected the place on the screen that each item would be on a given trial. On trial 1, we might have the horse on the left, the cow in the middle and the pig on the right. These would be moved around on every trial such that the student would only ever touch the same spot on the screen twice in a row.
4. Randomly present the comparison stimuli such that they are also never in the same place more than twice in a row.
As in number 3 above, the comparison stimuli also need to be moved around so that they don’t appear in the same place more than twice in a row.
5. Mastery Criterion.
The app was created with different levels and in order to progress to a next level the student must meet certain mastery criterion. In this particular app, ABA Find it!, the criterion was set at 8/9 trials correct in order to move ahead. This was selected based on the number of stimuli per category. Our future apps will likely have the ability to individualize this component of the app.
As mentioned earlier, there are many things to consider when teaching skills and concepts. These considerations are necessary in order to ensure that we are not facilitating fault stimulus control and that our learners are learning as fast and effectively as possible! Lucky for us we can figure out how to do this by referring to the literature in ABA. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about these 5 ways or any other ways to incorporate ABA into teaching.
