The Importance of Professional Discourse for the Continual Advancement of Practice Standards: The RBT® as a Case in Point.

The Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB®) created a third level of certification, the Registered Behavior Technician™ (RBT®) in 2014. The RBT® was created based upon the requests of stakeholders who wanted to credential those individuals who make direct contact with clients under the supervision of a Board Certified Behavior Analyst®. There has been tremendous growth in the number of RBTs® with over 60,000 individuals certified to date. The BACB® recently sent out a newsletter outlining changes to the RBT® certification, including the processes of training, supervising, and becoming an RBT®. These changes represent a number of potential concerns. The purpose of this paper is to highlight these concerns and to propose solutions to improve the RBT® certification.

Correction to: Behavioral Artistry: Examining the Relationship Between the Interpersonal Skills and Effective Practice Repertoires of Applied Behavior Analysis Practitioners.

The article Behavioral Artistry: Examining the Relationship Between the Interpersonal Skills and Effective Practice Repertoires of Applied Behavior Analysis Practitioners, written by Kevin Callahan, was originally published electronically on the publisher's internet portal (currently SpringerLink) on August 29, 2019 without open access. With the author(s)' decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on August, 2019 to © The Author(s) 2019 and the article is forthwith distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Behavioral Artistry: Examining the Relationship Between the Interpersonal Skills and Effective Practice Repertoires of Applied Behavior Analysis Practitioners.

This study investigated interpersonal skills associated with the concept of behavioral artistry (BA), a repertoire of practitioner behaviors including care, attentiveness, and creativity, among others, associated with the effective delivery of applied behavior analysis (ABA) treatment. Survey results indicated parents of children with autism preferred BA descriptors for ABA therapists over non-BA descriptors. A separate survey of 212 university students on a standardized personality assessment revealed students majoring and/or working in the field of ABA had lower levels of BA than those in other human services professions. Practitioners with higher BA scores were observed and rated more positively in their delivery of ABA for children with autism. Implications for training/supervising effective ABA practitioners within a BA model are discussed.

The maintenance of behavioral change: the case for long-term follow-ups.

This article discusses response maintenance, the durability of behavior change after therapy, treatment, or training ends. Response maintenance is one of the three forms of generalized behavior change, with the others being setting/situation generalization and response generalization. Long-term maintenance of treatment effects is an important issue after behavior change has taken place and is the goal of most programs. Areas discussed include factors affecting the study of maintenance, techniques for programming it, and analyzing and evaluating strategies for promoting it. This article presents a number of long-term follow-ups of programs designed to treat the addictive behaviors of typical adults (Foxx, 1982; Foxx, Brown, & Katz, 1981) and to teach social skills (Foxx & Faw, 1992) and language (Foxx & Faw, 1990) to individuals with intellectual disabilities and autism as well as to decrease their severe maladaptive behaviors (Foxx, 1990; Foxx & Livesay, 1984). In the process, various factors that appeared to contribute to long-term maintenance are identified. The article concludes with some recommendations regarding the study of maintenance.

Applied behavior analysis treatment of autism: the state of the art.

The treatment of individuals with autism is associated with fad, controversial, unsupported, disproven, and unvalidated treatments. Eclecticism is not the best approach for treating and educating children and adolescents who have autism. Applied behavior analysis (ABA) uses methods derived from scientifically established principles of behavior and incorporates all of the factors identified by the US National Research Council as characteristic of effective interventions in educational and treatment programs for children who have autism. ABA is a primary method of treating aberrant behavior in individuals who have autism. The only interventions that have been shown to produce comprehensive, lasting results in autism have been based on the principles of ABA.

Positive behavior support and applied behavior analysis.

This article reviews the origins and characteristics of the positive behavior support (PBS) movement and examines those features in the context of the field of applied behavior analysis (ABA). We raise a number of concerns about PBS as an approach to delivery of behavioral services and its impact on how ABA is viewed by those in human services. We also consider the features of PBS that have facilitated its broad dissemination and how ABA might benefit from emulating certain practices of the PBS movement.