PAM WOLFE: Hello, everyone. I'm Pam Wolfe. Welcome to our course on Autism and Applied Behavior Analysis. Let's get started with our segment one, looking at some of the objectives and how we'll go through the course.

First thing to understand is that we have a supplementary text by Miltenberger, which is called Behavior Modification Principles and Procedures. Now, I want you to understand that this book is not required reading. It's not something that we're asking or requiring you to obtain. But the book might be useful for some of you if you wanted to expand on some of the topics covered in the course.

Not everything in the course is sequenced according to the text. There's other information in there. But if you'd like a little bit more background, it might be useful for you. So not required reading, but may be used as supplementary text.

In terms of being successful for this course, there are a few things that help you get through and stay organized. The first is that we have Lesson 1 handouts for you that you can print out. You're going to watch the video segments and take notes on that handout if you'd like. You're going to watch the YouTube examples that we've located before the video segments.

So in some cases, you'll stop the video, and you'll go below and click onto a YouTube video, and that will give you some information, some examples, some concrete things to look at. You'll complete all of the associated activities. Some are located below the videos. Other we have at the end of the lesson.

You'll read the Lesson 1 discussion forum daily. What you'll find on the discussion forum is that you're asked to give some responses to some open-ended questions, some things that don't have an answer per se. But we're going to be asking you to think about some of the issues that are in applied behavior analysis.

And you'll need to check that daily because that's a really good way to keep up with your classmates. Sometimes there's information on there about changes in the assignment or things that your classmates have noticed. So it's a good thing to check that. And then you'll complete and submit the assignment one that goes with this lesson.

Now, in terms of the overview of this course, we have five lessons that are associated with the ABA and autism course. You're going to be first in our Lesson 1, introduction to Applied Behavior Analysis, or what we'll call ABA. Lesson 2, basic ABA principles. Lesson 3, application of those principles. Lesson 4, ASD interventions or strategies that use applied behavior analysis. And Lesson 5 are going to be some applications of applied behavior analysis for special issues like feeding, toileting, and sleeping, things that are not often covered but use applied behavior analysis techniques for really good success.

Let's get to some of the lesson objectives for our first lesson here. Identify the types of behavior used in applied behavior analysis. List the dimensions of ABA. Outline the historical development of applied behavior analysis. There's a history behind how this developed. Define empiricism and its role in applied behavior analysis. So what are we going to be using as evidence? Delineate dimensions of behavior, including things like how we might count things, frequency, duration, latency, or intensity. Distinguish between behaviors and nonbehaviors. What can we really count? What can we keep data on?

Creating operational definitions of behavior. How to make a behavior observable so we can count it and keep data on it. Describe methods of observation. Detail how graphs are used in data collection systems. Very important to use graphs to let us see an overall picture of behavior. Identifying parts of graphs. Describing how social validity is linked to behaviorism. So is what we're doing socially valid or acceptable or appropriate?

List the considerations for selecting behaviors for both reduction and acquisition. So we'll keep in mind that in some cases we want a behavior of our students to go down, and sometimes we want it to go up-- reduction or acquisition. Identify the components of a three-term contingency, and we'll talk a lot about that, an antecedent of behavior and a consequence. And listing single-subject research designs. We won't go in that very much, but we'll look at how we might design a study so we can see if there's evidence for it.