Is Training Without Generalization Effective?
by Adrienne Robek and Alicia M. Alvero Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York Although most articles are accounts of successful research studies, I prefer to think of the present article as an account of a “learning experience.” In 2002, my advisor at the time and I came up with a study to train staff at an applied behavior analysis (ABA) school for children with autism. Unfortunately, we did not get the results we had hoped for. We were never able to obtain experimental control over the behavior of the staff members. In the spring of 2004, I decided to take an introductory organizational behavior management (OBM) class and now that the semester is almost over, it is very clear to me why our study did not work. The following is a summary of what the study consisted of and why it was a “learning experience.” Many of the staff in the ABA school where the study was conducted knew how to conduct discrete trial teaching, but were not familiar with incident
