6th Edition BCBA Task List Study Guide - Full 6th Edition BACB task list breakdown

All right, welcome back to ABA Exam Review and the continuation of our 6th Edition BCBA Task List series. We're continuing H, selecting and implementing interventions with database decisions about procedural integrity. Now that we've got all of our interventions in place, we have trained, and we've let them run for a couple weeks, we now need to decide how we're going to supervise and manage the integrity of our interventions. Since you're the one as the BCBA writing and planning out treatment and interventions, you should care a lot about how they're implemented. And the way to be sure that your treatment plans you're writing are implemented correctly is to make database decisions about procedural integrity. So when you're out supervising, yes, you should be doing IOA, but you should also be monitoring how well is your staff matching what they're doing in implementation to your treatment plan. It's a very critical part of success for our clients. As always, please like, subscribe, and share. Check out behavioranalyststudy.com for all of our study materials. We also have RBT materials available. If you know any RBTs looking to pass their exam, as always, let us know when you pass. Work hard, study hard. Let's get going. What is procedural integrity? We're basically checking is our intervention implemented as written. I know as a BCBA, if I wrote an intervention, a behavior plan, uh skill acquisition plan, I wrote it for a reason. I The decisions I was making and writing down were there for a reason. And I want my staff to implement exactly what I put on paper. And I recognize it's my job to make sure that's happening. So, if I'm not tracking integrity, how are we going to know if the client's data are changing or not changing because of us or because of some other type of error. You can attribute no change in behavior to bad treatment when it's just bad implementation and vice versa. First thing we want to look at and think about is observer drift, right? And observer drift has to do with how we're measuring something. Treatment drift can be with how we're delivering the intervention. So, when we think about observer drift and treatment drift, it's just essentially how the plan is being implemented and measured over time. And that word drift implies that over time, even through no fault of the staff at all, the staff could be doing their absolute best, things happen, right? We work with human behavior. We work in changing environments. Our staff has things in their life going on. So, drift is very common. It's our role as BCBA supervisors to make sure we rein in that drift as much as possible. There's a correlation between high integrity and better skill acquisition and behavior reduction. Given that your treatment plan is good, given that training is done well, if there is procedural integrity, there's a correlation to better outcomes. It's the reason we also want to focus on parent training and parent fidelity. And then, as always, this is also systematically planned. Remember, nothing is hoped for or wished for or waited for. We plan everything, okay? So, integrity tracking, you should schedule it when you're going to do it. You should quantify it and ideally you want to graph integrity next to behavior data. So we can see integrity's high we're seeing the changes we want. Or we're not seeing the changes we want, but integrity's high. What does that mean for treatment? When making data based decisions, right, we've got to quantify these things. We have to be able to measure what we're looking at when doing our integrity checks. So one way to do that is do a checklist. So we can break that plan down into steps or targets that we want to see. What's the antecedent setup? What's the environment setup? What are prompts? What are our consequences? What are the alternative behaviors? What's the reinforcement schedule? So on and so forth. Seems like a lot, but that's really six or seven items that you need to check for. And if you break it into an easy checklist, you can quickly take data on how things are going. Everything is data driven. Don't just watch and say, "Looks good, doesn't look good." Let's take a little data, right, and analyze it and compare it to client behavior change. You can calculate integrity scores just like we calculate IOI or IOA, I should say. So if you have six steps, we can get a percentage of steps correct. Not too complicated, but also very important. What was our integrity for that session compared to 2 weeks ago? Is there drift? And then we want a baseline threshold. Now 80 to 90% is typically our mastery and what we want to see. For treatment, right, you want 100% ideally. Is it always possible? No, but that's what you want to shoot for. You don't want to shoot for 50% cuz we're doing half of the treatment wrong. So, think about that. 90% says nine out of 10 steps, or let's say you know, five out of six items are done correctly. We're shooting for 100%. Below 80 when it comes to integrity, even 80% is kind of pushing it. You're still missing something critical in your treatment and how it's being delivered. Shoot for 90, 100's ideal. We also want to compare staff implementation data against client progress. So, like we talked about, let's look at scenario A, okay? Staff integrity data is high. Let's say between 90 and 100%. Staff is Staff are doing what they're supposed to. Client's problem behavior drops, skill acquisition increases. What does this tell us? Well, it says treatment plan is being implemented correctly. We're seeing client change. Seems everything is going very well. What about B? Client's progress is stalling or reversing, and staff also shows a drop in integrity. So, there's a a problem with staff execution, and it says not a flawed behavior plan, but we need to fix the staff execution first before we can make judgments about our plan. So, if something's not working, always check implementation first and fix that initially. And then let's say staff integrity is at 100%. So, they're implementing everything perfectly. Yet, client is showing no progress. Now, we can say, all right, staff are doing what we're telling them to do 100% of the time, no progress, what's going on with my behavior plan? Now, when we see integrity fall, the first time you you notice a slip in integrity, you've got to act, right? We don't want to just write it off as a bad day. Because maybe it wasn't. And what you don't want to see is drift further and further away. So, from our checklist, we can look at exactly where we're going wrong. Is it the environment set up? Or is the consequence not being delivered appropriately? This is why simple measurements provide a lot of information. Then we want to use some behavioral skills training, right? We want to instruct, so review what they're doing wrong. Model. Do not skip modeling. Too many BCBAs skip modeling. Model how to do it the right way. Let the staff member rehearse and practice, and then give feedback. This is the golden way to fix these fidelity issues quickly and effectively. Again, don't skip the modeling piece. Too many times a BCBA will not model. They'll only give instruction, and then they'll wonder why things aren't done the way they want them done. You need to demonstrate and prove it can be done first if you expect your staff to do it as well. And then frequency of monitoring. If we notice a lot of integrity issues, increase your supervision, increase integrity checks, right? We don't treat every staff member the same. Okay? Some clients and some staff may not need as much close supervision. Whereas other clients and other staff need a lot more supervision, and that's what you're going to have to decide. Don't treat everybody equally because everybody has needs that are different from one another. So, decide what's the best use of your time to maximize treatment across all your clients. And then finally, we want to aggregate our integrity data, right? So, let's think about plan complexity. If integrity data is low across a lot of staff members, and so you have three RBTs on a team for a client, and integrity is low across the board. Is your treatment too complex? Was the training not effective enough? Always look at your yourself first, right? Before blaming somebody else. Do we need to simplify? Do we need to retrain? Resource allocation. Do we have enough resources available? Are you hands-on enough in your supervision? Dropping integrity scores, we need to address immediately. We don't want drift to get worse and worse and worse, cuz once drift gets too bad, we end up actually making the situation worse than before. And then prevent the reinforcement trap. This often comes when negative reinforcement, through, let's say, punishment of a client, leads to more punishment by your technician, cuz it's a way to avoid problem behaviors. So, that's procedural integrity, extremely important. Doesn't matter how good your behavior plan is if your training isn't good. If integrity is low, that means whatever you wrote and planned is not being done correctly, and that needs to be addressed immediately. Please like, share, subscribe, check out behavioranalyststudy.com for all of our study materials. When you pass, let us know. Work hard, study hard, and see you soon.