Skill Acquisition in ABA
Skill acquisition is a core component of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). It involves implementing procedures to teach new skills and behaviors that improve a client’s quality of life and independence. This section covers various teaching procedures, prompting strategies, chaining methods, and techniques for promoting generalization and maintenance of skills.
Why Skill Acquisition Matters
Effective skill acquisition procedures are essential in ABA for several reasons:
- Independence: Teaching skills that enable clients to function more independently
- Quality of life: Developing abilities that enhance daily living and social interaction
- Barrier reduction: Building skills that reduce obstacles to learning and participation
- Replacement behaviors: Teaching appropriate alternatives to challenging behaviors
- Progressive development: Building complex skills from simpler component skills
- Functional outcomes: Focusing on skills that have practical value in clients’ lives
Skill Acquisition Topics Covered
In this section, you’ll learn about the following skill acquisition procedures:
Teaching Procedures
- Discrete Trial Training (DTT)
- Naturalistic teaching strategies
- Incidental teaching
- Direct instruction
- Selecting appropriate teaching procedures
Prompting Strategies
- Types of prompts (verbal, gestural, model, physical)
- Prompt hierarchies
- Prompt fading techniques
- Errorless learning
- Transfer of stimulus control
Chaining Procedures
- Forward chaining
- Backward chaining
- Total task presentation
- Task analysis development
- Implementing chaining procedures effectively
Generalization and Maintenance
- Promoting skill generalization across settings
- Promoting skill generalization across people
- Promoting skill generalization across materials
- Maintenance programming
- Assessing generalization and maintenance
Shaping and Task Analysis
- Shaping procedures
- Successive approximation
- Creating effective task analyses
- Implementing task-analyzed instruction
- Data collection for task-analyzed skills
Key Concepts in Skill Acquisition
As you study skill acquisition in ABA, keep these key concepts in mind:
- Prerequisite skills: Identifying and teaching foundational abilities needed for more complex skills
- Stimulus control: Teaching responses to occur under specific antecedent conditions
- Reinforcement: Using consequences to increase target behaviors
- Prompting and fading: Providing and systematically removing assistance
- Error correction: Procedures for addressing incorrect responses
- Fluency: Building both accuracy and speed in skill performance
- Functional relevance: Focusing on skills that have practical value in clients’ lives
Importance for RBTs
As a Registered Behavior Technician (RBT), you’ll be responsible for:
- Implementing skill acquisition procedures as designed by the BCBA
- Using prompting strategies appropriately
- Collecting data on skill acquisition
- Implementing error correction procedures
- Reporting challenges in skill acquisition to your supervisor
- Maintaining a positive, reinforcing learning environment
Understanding skill acquisition procedures is essential for effective implementation of behavior analytic services and accounts for approximately 24% of the RBT exam content, making it one of the largest content areas on the exam.
Ready to Learn More?
Select a specific skill acquisition topic from the list above to dive deeper into each teaching procedure, or take a practice quiz to test your knowledge of skill acquisition concepts.