PSY7713 is the intervention counterpart to PSY7712 Behavior Analytic Assessments, translating functional assessment results into comprehensive, evidence-based behavior support and skill acquisition plans. Students develop the competency to design function-based interventions that address the communicative and environmental roots of problem behavior, implement evidence-based antecedent and consequence strategies, write structured skill acquisition programs, and use single-subject data to evaluate and adjust interventions over time — all aligned with BACB task list requirements.
Function-based intervention, skill acquisition, and treatment evaluation
Core topics
- Function-based behavior support plans: Translating functional assessment hypotheses into individualized behavior support plans — matching antecedent strategies, teaching replacement behaviors, and consequence strategies to the identified function (attention, escape, access to tangibles, automatic reinforcement). Why function-based interventions are more effective than non-function-based approaches, and how to write behavior support plans that meet professional and regulatory standards (BACB ethics, IDEA procedural requirements)
- Antecedent interventions: Modifying setting events and antecedents that occasion problem behavior — curriculum modification, environmental restructuring, choice provision, errorless learning, and noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) as an antecedent-based strategy that reduces motivation for problem behavior before it occurs. Predictability and control as establishing operation modifications
- Differential reinforcement procedures: The major differential reinforcement strategies — DRA (of alternative behaviors), DRI (of incompatible behaviors), DRO (of other behaviors), DRL (of lower rates) — their selection rationale based on function, implementation protocols, and schedules of reinforcement thinning for achieving durable behavior change
- Skill acquisition programming: Writing evidence-based discrete trial teaching (DTT) programs — task analysis, stimulus control procedures, prompt hierarchies (most-to-least, least-to-most), time delay, simultaneous prompting — and natural environment training (NET) approaches for teaching communication (functional communication training, PECS, AAC), social skills, daily living skills, and academic skills
- Generalization and maintenance programming: Designing for generalization from the start — training sufficient exemplars, loosening experimental control, using natural reinforcers, programming for common stimuli — and maintenance strategies that promote retention of learned skills over time and across environments without continued therapist support
- Data-based decision making and treatment evaluation: Using visual analysis of single-subject data to evaluate intervention effectiveness — reading graphs, identifying level, trend, and variability, applying the criteria for behavior change, knowing when to modify versus continue an intervention — and adapting interventions based on data when expected outcomes are not achieved
PSY7713 assignments include behavior support plan designs, skill acquisition programs, and single-subject data analyses
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Behavior support plans, skill acquisition programs, data analyses.
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Frequently asked questions
Functional communication training (FCT), developed by Carr and Durand in 1985, is one of the most important and widely replicated intervention approaches in applied behavior analysis. FCT is based on the observation that most problem behaviors — aggression, self-injury, elopement, property destruction — serve a communicative function: the person engages in the problem behavior because it reliably produces attention, escape from demands, access to preferred items, or other reinforcers. FCT teaches an alternative communicative response (a word, phrase, sign, picture exchange, or AAC device activation) that accesses the same reinforcer as the problem behavior but is more socially acceptable. Because the replacement behavior is function-matched, it competes successfully with the problem behavior for the reinforcer, producing rapid and often dramatic reduction in problem behavior while simultaneously building a new communicative skill. FCT is function-based (it requires an FBA first), socially valid (it builds communication, not just reduces behavior), and has a substantial evidence base across populations, settings, and communication modalities. PSY7713 trains students in implementing FCT and integrating it within comprehensive behavior support plans that address both problem behavior and skill development.