BCBA Exam (Board Certified Behavior Analyst) — All Questions

A clinician first records when a child's tantrums occur, then finds they are most frequent at transitions, and finally shows that tantrums fall each time a visual transition warning is introduced and rise when it is withdrawn. The final step reaches which level of scientific understanding?

• a.Replication
• b.Experimental control✓
• c.Systematic description
• d.Prediction

The BCBA Test Content Outline names description, prediction and control as the goals of the science. Systematic observation is description, and noticing that tantrums co-vary with transitions is prediction (a correlation). Only manipulating the warning and seeing behavior change each time demonstrates control, a functional relation. Replication strengthens a finding but is not one of the three levels.

A team is asked why a student hits peers. Before proposing an inner 'anger drive', the behavior analyst checks whether simple, already-demonstrated environmental variables such as peer attention account for the hitting. Which philosophical assumption is guiding this step?

• a.Determinism
• b.Pragmatism
• c.Selectionism
• d.Parsimony✓

Parsimony means ruling out the simplest, already-established explanations before considering more complex or hypothetical ones, which is exactly what checking peer attention before an inner drive does. Determinism is the assumption that behavior is lawful and caused; selectionism concerns variation and selection by consequences; pragmatism judges ideas by their practical outcomes. The outline lists all four as assumptions, but only parsimony describes this ordering of explanations.

Skinner described operant behavior as being shaped over an individual's lifetime by its consequences, in a way analogous to how natural selection shapes species. This view is called

• a.empiricism
• b.determinism
• c.parsimony
• d.selectionism✓

Skinner's 'Selection by consequences' (1981) placed operant conditioning alongside natural selection and cultural evolution as selection processes, the assumption called selectionism. Empiricism is reliance on objective observation, determinism is the assumption that events are lawful, and parsimony is preferring the simplest adequate explanation; none of them describes variation plus selection.

Which statement is consistent with Skinner's radical behaviorism?

• a.Thinking and feeling cannot be studied and must be left out of a science of behavior
• b.Only behavior that two independent observers can see qualifies as behavior
• c.Thinking and feeling are behavior, controlled like public behavior✓
• d.Thinking and feeling are inner causes that initiate a person's public behavior

Radical behaviorism treats private events such as thinking and feeling as behavior that is subject to the same controlling variables as public behavior (Skinner, 1945; 1974). Excluding them because they cannot be publicly observed is the position of methodological behaviorism, which the requirement of two independent observers also reflects. Treating thoughts as the initiating causes of behavior is mentalism, which radical behaviorism rejects.

A journal article describes a treatment in enough detail that a trained reader could replicate it from the written description alone. Which of Baer, Wolf, and Risley's dimensions of applied behavior analysis does this satisfy?

• a.Technological✓
• b.Conceptually systematic
• c.Analytic
• d.Generality

Baer, Wolf and Risley (1968) called a study technological when its procedures are identified and described completely enough for replication. Conceptually systematic means procedures are tied to basic principles, analytic means a believable demonstration of the events responsible for change, and generality means the change lasts over time or spreads to other settings and behaviors.

A report shows that a client's self-injury dropped to near zero after treatment, but no experimental design was used to show that the treatment, rather than something else, produced the change. Which dimension of applied behavior analysis is missing?

• a.Behavioral
• b.Analytic✓
• c.Effective
• d.Applied

Baer, Wolf and Risley (1968) defined analytic as a believable demonstration of the events responsible for the behavior change, which requires experimental control. The target was socially important (applied), was measured behavior (behavioral), and changed meaningfully (effective); what is missing is evidence that the treatment was responsible.