Stop Avoiding it: The Case for Treating Academic Skills as Behavioral Operants | 2 BCBA CEU Credits

Objectives

1. Define academic skills as behavioral operants and describe how antecedents, responses, and consequences influence their acquisition.
2. Identify similarities between academic and non-academic operants and describe how to apply the instructional hierarchy (acquisition, fluency, generalization, adaptation) to academic instruction.
3. Analyze student performance data to develop functional hypotheses related to skill deficits, performance deficits, generalization failures, and instructional mismatches.
4. Use scope and sequence analysis to prioritize and sequence academic skills, ensuring instruction is developmentally appropriate and behaviorally effective.

Speaker/Author

Jillian Dawes, Ph.D., NCSP, BCBA-D, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at The Citadel. Her primary teaching and research interests include the science of learning and behavior applied across academic and non-academic operants in school settings, as well as ethical considerations in training, research, and practice. She has published one book, one book chapter, and several peer-reviewed articles in the areas of ethical decision making and considerations, measure validation, and comparative math intervention research.