Problem
Case Study I: Shane, a 6 year old diagnosed with autism, was referred to you for the recent increase in hitting others and a drop in his academic progress. Shane was receiving at-home behavioral programming and had been thriving with the program for several years. Staff were all well trained and his parents were highly knowledgeable about the programming.
The increase in hitting prompted the parent to ask you, the head BCBA, to suggest an intervention. Knowing that Shane did well in the past with a token economy, you designed one using his favorite activity, playing on the computer, as the reinforcer. For each 10 min period that Shane worked without becoming aggressive, a letter was added to his token board. Once he spelled out the words "I EARNED COMPUTER" he would receive 10 min access to the computer.
Although Shane initially seemed motivated by the token economy, and had previous experience earning generalized reinforcers, the program failed to improve Shane's aggressive behaviors. Everyone agreed that Shane continued to find the computer to be his most reinforcing activity and yet, he never earned enough tokens to access it. His aggressive behavior continued to present a significant barrier to the learning process and his academic progress began to slip even more.
Answer each of the following questions.
1) Is the treatment function based? Explain.
2) Why might the token economy, as described, not worked for Shane?
3) Assuming you wanted to keep the token economy, how might you make changes to improve it?
Case Study II: Hal is an 8 year old boy diagnosed with autism and Down Syndrome. Recently Hal had been giving his teaching staff a lot of exercise as he was frequently running out of the classroom during lessons. Not only was he exiting the classroom but because his classroom was near the back door of the school, he would often get a head start and make it out into the playground where he continued to run quickly away from the building.
You are called in to observe and on the day you are present, you see Hal run out of the classroom twice. Each time staff follow him as quickly as possible, but you notice that they are slowed down a bit because they are grabbing a "choice board" on the way out the door to follow Hal. When they catch up to him, they ask him, via his choice board, what other academic activity he would rather be doing and then prompt him to return to the classroom and allow him to go do that activity. Despite Hal's compliance following each episode of elopement, he continues to engage in elopement from the class at least twice per day.
Answer the following questions.
1) Why might the choice board intervention, as described, not be working to reduce Hal's elopement?
2) Assuming that you want to keep the choice board in place, how might you make changes to improve it?