PSY5006 is the entry point into Capella's ABA program — a course that separates ABA from general psychology by grounding it in the behavioral science tradition. Before learning techniques like discrete trial training or functional communication training, students need to understand WHY behavior analysis works the way it does and what philosophical and empirical commitments underpin every ABA procedure.
Philosophical foundations of behaviorism and ABA
Applied behavior analysis has its roots in radical behaviorism — B.F. Skinner's position that psychology should study observable behavior and the environmental variables that control it, and that concepts like "mind" or "emotion" are best understood as private verbal behavior subject to the same laws of conditioning as overt behavior. This contrasts with methodological behaviorism (Watson's position) which simply excluded private events from scientific study. Radical behaviorism accepts private events as real but studies them through the subject's verbal behavior about them.
The transition from the laboratory to applied settings was documented by Donald Baer, Montrose Wolf, and Todd Risley in their landmark 1968 article "Some Current Dimensions of Applied Behavior Analysis" in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA's inaugural issue). This paper defined what makes ABA distinct from the experimental analysis of behavior and from other behavioral approaches.
The seven dimensions of ABA (Baer, Wolf & Risley, 1968)
Applied, Behavioral, Analytic, Technological, Conceptually Systematic, Effective, Generality
- Applied: Behavior studied must be socially significant — it must matter to the person, family, or community being served. Researchers and practitioners choose target behaviors based on social value, not theoretical interest alone.
- Behavioral: The focus is on behavior itself — observable, measurable actions — not inferences about internal states. The subject's actual behavior (not impressions of it) must be measured directly.
- Analytic: The practitioner must demonstrate a functional relationship between the intervention and behavior change. Single-case experimental designs (reversal, multiple baseline, alternating treatments) allow demonstration of experimental control.
- Technological: Procedures must be described precisely enough that any trained practitioner can replicate them with fidelity. Vague descriptions ("provide reinforcement") are insufficient; specific, operational definitions are required.
- Conceptually systematic: Procedures must be tied to the principles of behavior from which they are derived. Practitioners should be able to explain WHY a procedure works in terms of reinforcement, extinction, stimulus control, or other behavioral principles.
- Effective: The intervention must produce practically meaningful behavior change — not merely statistically significant change. Behavior analysis cares about whether the change matters in the person's life.
- Generality: Behavior change should persist over time (maintenance), appear in untrained settings (generalization across settings), and extend to untrained behaviors (response generalization).
Key topics in PSY5006
- Operant and respondent conditioning: Skinner's three-term contingency (Antecedent → Behavior → Consequence); reinforcement (positive and negative), punishment (positive and negative), extinction, and the distinction between respondent (Pavlovian) and operant (instrumental) learning
- Schedules of reinforcement: continuous reinforcement (CRF), fixed ratio (FR), variable ratio (VR), fixed interval (FI), variable interval (VI) and their characteristic response patterns; ratio strain and post-reinforcement pause
- Measurement systems in ABA: frequency/rate (events per unit time), duration, latency, inter-response time (IRT), intensity, trials to criterion, and momentary time sampling vs. partial interval vs. whole interval recording; selecting the right measurement system for different target behaviors
- Functional behavior assessment (FBA): the hypothesis-driven process for identifying the maintaining variables of problem behavior — indirect assessment (interviews, rating scales like FAST, MAS, QABF), direct observation (ABC recording, scatterplot), and functional analysis (Iwata et al., 1982/1994); the four function categories (attention, escape, access to tangibles, automatic/sensory reinforcement)
- BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts (2020): the four sections (Responsibility as a Behavior Analyst; Responsibility in Practice; Responsibility to Clients and Stakeholders; Responsibility to the Profession and Science); core ethical principles of benefiting clients, avoiding harm, competence, and professional integrity
- Verbal behavior: Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior (1957) and the fundamental operants — mand, tact, echoic, intraverbal, textual, and transcriptive; why verbal behavior analysis matters for assessment and language intervention in autism spectrum disorder
- The BACB and credentialing: the Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) credential requirements — supervised fieldwork hours, coursework verified by a BACB-approved VCS program, the BCBA examination; the BCaBA credential for undergraduate-level supervised practice
PSY5006 assignments include FBA write-ups, behavioral dimension analyses, and ethics case studies
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Frequently asked questions
PSY5002 is the master's orientation course for ALL MS Psychology specializations — counseling, I/O, school psychology, and ABA. It surveys general psychological theory (psychodynamic, cognitive, humanistic, behavioral) and introduces APA ethics and graduate academic writing. PSY5006 is specifically for students in the ABA specialization and goes much deeper into the behavioral science tradition — Skinner's radical behaviorism, the experimental analysis of behavior, the seven dimensions of ABA, measurement systems, and BACB ethics. Students in ABA-focused tracks typically take PSY5006 instead of or in addition to PSY5002, depending on their program of study. PSY5006 is aligned with the Behavior Analyst Certification Board's (BACB) Sixth Edition Task List and its content directly prepares students for the coursework requirements toward BCBA certification.
The BACB Task List is the official outline of competencies that the Behavior Analyst Certification Board has identified as essential for behavior analysts. The Sixth Edition Task List (BCBA-6) is organized into sections covering foundational knowledge, concepts and principles, behavior assessment, behavior-change procedures, personnel supervision and management, and ethics. Capella's ABA courses are designed as a Board-approved Verified Course Sequence (VCS), meaning the content maps directly to Task List competencies in a way that the BACB has reviewed and approved. When you write a paper in PSY5006 on measurement procedures or functional assessment, you are also demonstrating mastery of specific Task List items that you will need to document when applying for the BCBA examination. This alignment is why PSY5006 uses very specific terminology (e.g., "positive reinforcement" rather than "reward") and why operational precision in writing is emphasized from the start.