The Application of Relational Frame Theory to Teaching Early Piano Skills to Children on the Autism Spectrum.

Music is a unique form of verbal stimuli (Reynolds & Hayes, The Psychological Record, 67(3), 413-421, 2017) and the literature has indicated some success in using procedures involving the frame of coordination or stimulus equivalence to teach early piano skills to learners with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD; Hill et al., Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 53(1), 188-208, 2020). However, these studies only targeted narrow skills rather than a complete repertoire. Also, whether such teaching procedure is effective for young children with ASD at different ages, with different needs, and with common accompanied diagnosis, is unknown. The current study (a) explored the possibility of applying relational frame theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001) in piano program development that aims to teach a complete early piano repertoire, and (b) confirmed the effectiveness of an adjusted teaching procedure using the frame of coordination on teaching early piano skills to six young children on the autism spectrum. A multiple probe across participants design was used. After direct training of two relations (AC & AE), post-instructional tests were conducted on eight relations. The results showed that with remedial training, five out of six participants demonstrated mutual entailment, combinatorial entailment, and transformation of stimulus function in these relations. All participants could read and play the song on keyboard without extra training. The study provided practical guidance on applying the procedure to these young learners. Implications of RFT in piano curriculum development were also discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-022-00175-8.

Anti-Oppressive Restorative Justice: Behavior Analysis in Alternatives to Policing.

The history of American policing, behavior criminalization, and carceral justice is rooted in racist practice dating back to the 1700s. In addition to racially disproportionate punishment doled out by these systems, they are not designed to support behavioral punishment of harm or reinforcement of prosocial behavior for socially significant change. One alternative to this retributive carceral justice system is restorative justice. This article offers a conceptually systematic examination of restorative justice for behavior change, an examination of the functional utility of various restorative approaches, alignment of restorative justice with behavior analytic ethics, and suggestions for incorporating anti-oppressive practices.

Learning Channels: The Role of Compound Stimuli in the Emergence of Intraverbal Relations in Children on the Autism Spectrum.

Teaching tact and intraverbal responses based on function-feature-class to children with language delays can result in the emergence of untrained relational responses. The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of compound stimuli in discriminated operants (i.e., different combinations of hear, see, touch, and taste) on the acquisition of object-attribute relations, on the emergence of untrained attribute-object relations, and on the acquisition and emergence of same-different relations between objects and their attributes. All the participants were on the autism spectrum and between 4 and 12 years old. Participants who did not meet the mastery criterion or show emergent intraverbal responses during initial training trials completed a fluency-based practice phase. Overall results showed that all six participants required fewer trials to meet the criterion in the condition involving compound stimuli (e.g., HearSeeSay plus Touch, Taste, or Sniff) as compared to the HearSeeSay-alone condition. In addition, participants required fewer fluency practice timings in the condition involving compound stimuli to meet fluency aim.

A Self-Assessment Tool for Cultivating Affirming Practices With Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming (TGNC) Clients, Supervisees, Students, and Colleagues.

In the field of applied behavior analysis, professionals are likely to interact with transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) people, either as clients, in a supervision context, in the university classroom, or in the workplace. This paper presents a self-assessment checklist tool that can be used to assess one's current behaviors of TGNC-affirming practices, along with guidance for using the tool to achieve growth in this area.