When designing a shaping program, which of the following is the error a BCBA should be most cautious about?

A BCBA is reducing a client’s frequent mouthing of non-food objects, which is maintained by automatic sensory input. The team wants to reinforce a response that delivers comparable oral stimulation and physically cannot occur at the same moment as mouthing objects. Which differential reinforcement arrangement is the BEST match for this plan?

A learner is directly taught two conditional discriminations with match-to-sample: given sample A select comparison B (A to B), and given sample B select comparison C (B to C). On unreinforced probes the learner reliably selects C when given A (A to C) but responds at chance when given B and asked to select A (B to A) and when given C and asked to select B (C to B). Which conclusion is BEST supported by these results?

A clinician plans a trial to teach a child to request a preferred snack. To maximize the snack’s reinforcing effectiveness and the likelihood the child emits the request, which arrangement is MOST appropriate immediately before the trial?

A behavior analyst runs a standard multielement functional analysis. Hand mouthing occurs at moderate, variable rates across the attention, escape, and tangible conditions but is highest and most stable in the condition where the client is alone with no materials, no demands, and no programmed consequences. Which interpretation is best supported, and what follows from it?

A behavior analyst’s final report documents a 90 percent reduction in problem behavior, high treatment integrity, and strong interobserver agreement. A peer reviewer notes that the evaluation never assessed social validity. Which addition would most directly close that gap?

A BCBA with a strong behavior analytic background is asked to develop a feeding intervention for a child with pediatric feeding disorder. The BCBA has studied some of the literature on feeding but has no supervised clinical experience in feeding therapy. A feeding specialist is available in the same organization but is not a BCBA. What should the BCBA do?

A BCBA is about to begin a new behavior intervention program for an adult client with mild intellectual disability. The client’s mother holds legal guardianship. What is the most complete approach to consent and assent?

A BCBA measures vocal loudness in a client who tends to yell, using a decibel meter to record the peak level of each vocal outburst. Which dimension of behavior is being captured, and why is this the best choice over frequency?

A bar graph of mean session rates of problem behavior across three classrooms shows bars of 2.1, 2.0, and 2.2 responses per minute. A BCBA concludes that setting has no meaningful effect. Which limitation of summary bar graphs most directly weakens this conclusion?

A BCBA is supervising several staff members in a clinic that serves individuals with severe problem behavior. She wants to use a tiered supervision model to allocate her limited supervisory time effectively. Which of the following best describes how a tiered model should be structured in a behavior-analytic framework?

A trainee accruing supervised fieldwork works Monday through Wednesday at a clinic supervised by one qualified BCBA and Thursday through Friday at a school supervised by a different qualified BCBA. At month end the trainee asks the clinic supervisor to sign off on the entire month’s hours to keep the paperwork simple. How should the clinic supervisor respond?

A BCBA uses a structured interview to assess whether a family finds an intervention procedure acceptable before implementing it, and the family rates it highly acceptable. After implementation begins, the family reports discomfort with how the procedure looks in public settings. How should the BCBA respond?

A BCBA is finalizing a goal to teach a client to request a break instead of engaging in escape-maintained problem behavior. Four candidate goal statements are drafted. Which one is written entirely in observable and measurable terms?

A researcher conducting a changing-criterion design notices that the participant’s behavior consistently overshoots the criterion at each phase, stabilizing well above the required level before the next criterion is introduced. What threat to internal validity does this pattern most directly illustrate?

A behavior analyst wants to decide whether a new prompting procedure improves tooth-brushing accuracy for one 9-year-old client who has responded atypically to most past interventions. A colleague proposes a group study comparing 20 children on the new procedure against 20 on the standard procedure and comparing the group means. If the goal is a confident treatment decision for THIS client, why is establishing steady-state responding for the individual and comparing conditions within that client the better strategy?

A behavior analyst treats pragmatism as her working truth criterion. She has two competing conceptual formulations of a client’s problem behavior, and both fit the existing data equally well. Consistent with pragmatism, how should she decide between them?

A supervisee is programming for an adult client who works through multi-step vocational tasks and can be seen quietly whispering instructions to himself as he goes. The supervisee asks how a radical behaviorist should treat this whispered and partly covert self-instruction when analyzing the client’s task performance. Which recommendation is most consistent with radical behaviorism?