Are you using transfer procedures to teach children with autism if you're not
you definitely want to tune in for this short video blog where I am going to be
talking about a paper that was published by myself and Dr. Rick Kubina my BCBA
mentor in 2005 called using transfer procedures to teach tacts to a child
with autism
Hi, I'm Dr. Mary Barbera autism mom board certified behavior analyst online course
creator and best-selling author of the verbal behavior approach, each week I
provide you with some of my ideas about turning autism around so if you haven't
subscribed to my YouTube channel you should do that now so a few weeks ago on
a podcast episode I interviewed Dr. Rick Kubina who was my BCBA mentor we
briefly talked about our study that we published together but I thought I would
jump on here and talk about this study because it really could help you with
your children or clients with autism so if you want to listen to the podcast
interview that is episode number 14 you can go to marybarbera.com/14
or you can check out all my podcasts at on my website at MaryBarbera.com/podcast
So years ago I think I was a new BCBA or studying to
become a BCBA when I first learned about transfer procedures up until that point
what was happening was I had my son Lucas and he was you know four or five I
was using first a Lovaas approach then a verbal behavior approach but I still
didn't know what transfer procedures were this is like maybe 2001 so he would
say open cabinet I would prompt him I would prompt him to
say open cabinet he would echo open cabinet
I would prompt him I would pull out a pretzel I'd say pretzel he'd say pretzel
and I would give it to him all that was doing was I was leaving things at the
prompt level and he was echoing me but he didn't have any spontaneous language
or not enough and so what I started doing then once I found out about
transfer procedures is I would pull out the pretzel I'd say pretzel he would
echo pretzel and then I would say what do you want and he would say pretzel now
that's an example of an echoic prompt to a mand and it's still prompted
but we were able to then push out the prompts and the transfers maybe pull in
a couple distractors and get more spontaneous language it's not just used
for manding either it's used for all different operands and when Lucas went
to and this is in my book in Chapter 7 I believe Lucas went to a private ABA
school and he didn't know anybody's name so when the therapist would come I
believe in my book I say it was Amber and he would say she would say bye Lucas
she would come to the house but she worked with him primarily at school she
would say bye Lucas and he'd say bye Haley who was his teacher so what I
determined because at that point I was a behavior analyst was that he didn't know
the tacts of the people that the only time he practiced greetings was during circle
time so I asked the school could you send home 10 pictures of kids and staff
and I will teach him I will drill him and I will teach him these names and
then he'll go back and he'll generalize it to greetings because that was another
skill we had taught him so that's what happened he came home I drilled him and
the way I drilled him was using transfer procedures he went back he generalized
to greetings and then when when Amber would come she'd say hi Lucas he'd
say hi Amber when she say bye Lucas he'd say bye Amber and he did that across the
ten people I taught him so I called up Rick Kubina my mentor and I said you
know what this is this worked out so well like he learned this this greetings
are in so many IEP goals like maybe we need to publish something like this and
so Rick said well we can't publish anything like that you don't have like
what did you even do what would drilling did you do and basically what it turned
out to be was a receptive to tact transfer and an echoic to tact transfer
combination touch Haley or well he already had Haley but touch
Johnny he touched Johnny he would echo when he'd touch and then I'd pull it up
and I'd say who is it and he'd say Johnny and I drilled him for like five
minutes using a combination of these transfer procedures and so Rick said well
we can't publish that but we can set up a study with unknown tacts and we can set
up a multiple design study which I had just graduated from my ABA certification
from Penn State and I was just like okay I learned about multiple baseline
alternating treatment designs but until you actually do a study like that and
have somebody like Dr. Kubina help me set it up I really learned a lot and
what we learned with Lucas is that he learned very well with the procedure and
it was one of the first articles that used humans and transfer procedures up
until that point most of the transfer procedure articles and studies were
using animals mostly pigeons so with the transfer procedure multiple baseline we
have Lucas learning with set one set two and set three and we went on to do other
studies with transfer procedures I did through the verbal behavior project they
were not published I did present on another study using transfer procedures
and I know several dissertations have come out of this original article too in
2005 it was published so we'll link that in the description below but one of the
things that I really want to tell you is that if you are not using transfer
procedures you are probably leaving things at a prompted level and then
saying the child or client is prompt dependent and my approach uses transfer
procedures everywhere throughout the day in intensive teaching in the natural
environment across operands to basically fade prompts use use prompts that will
work and fade prompt systematically using transfer procedures
so it's a big part of what I do it's a big part of my online courses errorless
teaching error correction using the operands that the child has their
strongest points in and pulling up the other operand so Lucas was was always
better with receptive abilities then tactic abilities so we used the touch
banana what is it banana banana obviously wasn't wasn't a
hard target for him but um we use we can use transfer procedures across the board
so if you want to learn more definitely download the article and if you really
want to learn more about my approach and how you might be able to use transfer
procedures with your clients or children I would encourage you to sign up for my
free online workshop at MaryBarbera.com/workshop and I would
really encourage you at the end of the workshop to sign up for my online course
and community because that is really the way to dive in deep learn more about how
you can make things better for your child or your clients I teach both
parents and professionals that's always been my approach my book is can be read
by a layperson it's also used for graduate level coursework so I am big on
teach professionals and parents teach professionals how to bring things down
to a level that everybody can understand to make common-sense decisions to look
at the forest to consider family values and I believe we have one of the
strongest online autism communities out there for my online course and community
and it's just so supportive so positive helping each child reach their fullest
potential so I hope I've incentivized you to start using transfer procedures
can start as early as today by reading the article and learning more and you
can also for free online workshop check out marybarbera.com/workshop
and I'll see you right here next week