Cal ABA 2018

by: Allison Bickelman, M.S., BCBA

This past weekend, our executive team and the majority of ABI’s masters students in ABA attended the California Association for Behavior Analysis’ (CalABA’) 36^th Annual Western Regional Conference in Santa Clara.  This conference provides behavior analysts, allied professionals, parents, and students with a myriad of presentations, panel discussions, and events related to behavior analysis, provided by prominent researchers, clinicians, and faculty in the field.

ABI was proud to participate in this year’s conference!  Our Quality Assurance Manager, Allison Bickelman, presented findings from her research examining the use of behavioral skills training and group contingencies to teach social skills to school-aged children with ASD. During her talk, Allison presented outcome data from a social skills group run last summer with six boys, who all learned multiple new social skills such as greeting friends, having a conversation, and personal space, by having these skills orally explained to them, modeled by adults, and having opportunities to practice these skills peers while receiving feedback.

Associate program supervisor, Azizull Dhadwal, presented preliminary findings from her master’s thesis research examining teaching perspective taking skills to children with autism spectrum disorder. Specifically, her study focused on teaching children how to identify what others know and believe. For example, when a child is presented with a Skittles box but then is shown that the box actually contains paper clips, the child is asked what another person will believe is in the box (the correct answer being skittles, as the other person did not see the paper clips inside). She successfully taught two boys how to identify the false beliefs of others, and will be running this study with one more participant in the coming months. These procedures are used at ABI to teach perspective taking and complex language skill to our clients.

Lead skills trainer and masters student Carissa Basile, along with her professor Dr. Tara Fahmie, and co-authors Elizabeth Hernandez, Sean Christensen, Allison Bickelman, and Roxanna Diaz, presented her research in collaboration with ABI as a poster. Her study focused on teaching social skills to boys with ASD using competitive and cooperative group contingencies (i.e., the kids either worked together as a team, or in opposition to each other while playing games and learning new social skills such as how to ask a peer for an item). Both types of contingencies were effective in helping establish new social skills, and the children and parents all enjoyed being a part of the group and making new friends.

A main highlight of the weekend was the opening address by Dr. Bill Heward, one of the authors of the infamous “White Book” which all masters students in ABA read early on in their career, in which he discussed the importance of choosing critical target behaviors that will help our clients, not only now, but in the future.