1	Analysis and Instruction for Common Misconceptions of Basic Contingencies Nathalie Witt Lesley Frakes and Ben Rottschafer Jason Otto, BCBA Western Michigan University April 2, 2003
2	PSY 360: The Course PSY 360 is a required Psychology course for undergraduates. Students learn about basic principles of behavior analysis in a structured manner. They are provided with homework assignments, vocabulary flashcards, and other assigned sections to increase their knowledge and understanding of behavior analysis.
3	PSY 360: The Course Students also read Elementary Principles of Behavior (EPB), which analyzes case studies using contingency diagrams. They complete homework for each seminar to give them practice diagramming the contingencies. Often the quizzes include contingency diagrams.
4	The Seminar The Seminar meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays for approximately 2 hours. The TAs discuss the agenda, homework, EPB, and probe questions. Students show their original examples of a contingency diagram on transparencies to the class.
5	Purpose of PSY 360 The goal of PSY 360 is to produce undergraduate students who use the principles of behavior analysis in their personal and professional life. One of the primary purposes of PSY 360 is for the students to identify examples of the eight basic contingencies.
6	Continuous Quality Improvement In order to achieve the goal of producing competent undergraduates, we analyze PSY 360 using the six steps of behavioral systems analysis. This helps those involved with PSY 360 accomplish the goal in an organized and efficient manner.
7	Six Steps of Behavioral Systems Analysis 1. Analyze the Natural Contingencies: Why do students confuse one basic contingency for another? 2. Specify the Performance Objectives: What do we need to do in order to achieve our goal? Students should discriminate between the eight basic contingencies. 3. Design an Intervention: What is the best way to get to our goal? Develop Programmed Instruction specifically for those common misconceptions.
8	Six Steps of Behavior Analysis 4. Implement the Intervention: Add the Programmed Instruction as a new homework assignment to PSY 360. 5. Evaluate the Intervention: Did it work or not work and how well did it work or not work? Compare past posttest performance to this semester’s posttest performance. 6. Recycle through the previous steps until we achieve our performance objectives.
9	Analyze the Data Students have consistently confused certain contingencies with other contingencies when given a description. We discovered these problems in two ways.
10	Discovering the Problems First, we analyzed posttest results from the previous two semesters (Winter and Summer 2002). We specifically looked at questions that 10% or more students answered incorrectly. We further looked for specific contingencies the students chose as the wrong answer. These answers lead us to the common misconceptions.
11	The Posttest The posttest is a 20 question test the students take at the end of the semester. Each question is a description of a behavioral interaction of a person or animal. They must choose one of the 8 basic contingencies from a list that best describes the scenario.
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13	The Results from the Posttest The following slide is a table from the Common Misconceptions homework. This shows the results of the posttest analysis for the top commonly missed contingencies. The results are for a total of 91 students from Summer and Winter 2002 semesters.
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15	Possible Conclusions Either the TAs are not comparing and contrasting the contingencies during the seminar or they were not aware of these common misconceptions and thus did not discuss these misconceptions. The homework also does not address these misconceptions at all.
16	"Now let’s analyze the students" Now let’s analyze the students’ natural contingencies. We will first view an example from an existing programmed instruction of students failing to identify the correct contingency.
17	Case of Sid’s Belching “In the middle of scarfing down his oats, Sid belches with pride. His wife Dawn picks up his steaming bowl of rolled oats and she tosses the entire delicacy into the compost bucket. Somehow in the future, Sid finds himself less likely to display his gustatory pleasure with a belch.”
18	Case of Sid’s Belching The correct contingency would look like this: But, the students identify it as this:
19	Case of Sid’s Belching 25% of a total of 70 students are saying this contingency is a punishment by the prevention of the presentation of a reinforcer instead of the correct answer of penalty. They are failing to identify that the reinforcer is present in the before condition. They are focusing on the after condition and seeing that the reinforcer is no longer present.
20	The Natural Contingencies There are no natural contingencies for training the subtle distinctions of these discriminations. Unless we force the students to discriminate, they will not notice them easily.
21	Specify the Performance Objectives The objectives of this Chapter homework is to clarify the common misconceptions and therefore, increase the students’ posttest scores. Hopefully by identifying the behaviors involved with the misconceptions and training them directly, the students will follow this strategy and identify them correctly.
22	Design an Intervention Because there were no prior materials in PSY 360 that focused on the common misconceptions of the eight basic contingencies, we decided to create a homework assignment focusing on these problems.
23	Designing the Assignment As a result of these analyses, we developed the assignment based on the common misconceptions determined by the posttest results. We performed one-to-one testing with students in PSY 360. However, these students did not provide much information because they all ready could identify most of the common misconceptions.
24	Designing the Assignment We also distributed the assignment to a supplementary course of PSY 360. These students finished the assignment and received points contingent on providing comments and suggestions for the assignment. This is where we received the most help in terms of the revision process.
25	Design an Intervention The students must complete the homework assignment before the next seminar or they will lose 20 points. At this moment, the homework will be distributed to the students at the beginning of April.
26	Implement the Intervention The TAs will distribute the homework to their students during the seminar providing the instructions to finish the assignment for the following seminar. The students will be reminded of the point value of the homework. This homework also affects their overall homework grade in the PSY 360 course.
27	Evaluate the Intervention We plan to provide a pretest before and a posttest after the homework to all students. This pretest and posttest will be similar to the posttest they will take at the end of the course.
28	Evaluate the Intervention We will then compare the posttest scores to the pretest scores to determine if the homework did indeed reduce the common misconceptions. We will also compare the end-of-the semester posttest with previous semesters’ posttest results to determine if there was an increase in posttest scores because of the new programmed instruction.
29	Recycle We will recycle through the previous steps until we have achieved the performance objectives of increasing their posttest scores. This semester, we have been revising the homework to make it more specific to the problems we saw from the posttest data.
30	Recycle We first reanalyzed the posttest data and entered this data into the homework. We ordered the misconceptions from the most to least mistakes. Then we arranged the sections according to this ranking. We will provide more examples for those common misconceptions that have more mistakes on the posttest.
31	Recycle We also plan on performing alpha testing with Doctoral and Masters students to ensure we are identifying the common misconceptions clearly. They will complete it just as the PSY 360 students will do for seminar. Based on their results, we will make the final necessary revisions to the homework before distributing it to the students.
32	Recycle Then we will distribute the homework to the TAs to give to their students. The TAs will complete an analysis of the errors students commonly made on the assignment. These errors will be discussed at the TA meeting and solutions to these problems will be proposed.
33	Recycle These proposed revisions will be made to the homework assignment in a new version. Finally, this revised assignment will be placed in the coursepack for the following semester.
34	Thank you A special thanks goes to my undergraduate research assistants, Lesley Frakes and Ben Rottschafer, for all of their hard work and dedication to this project. Thank you for attending this presentation. Any questions or comments? BACK to BATS website