S3E2: Precision Teaching and Behavior Dynamics with Rick Kubina

Welcome to Behavior Analysis in Practice, the podcast. Behavior Analysis in Practice is a podcast committed to narrowing the research practice gap and demystifying the research process. Each episode will take a deep dive into the latest work published in Behavior Analysis in Practice, the journal, by interviewing the paper's author about the topic. We'll explore the nuances of each paper and ask the questions you wish you could ask the authors after reading the paper.

Hello, welcome back to Behavior Analysis in Practice, the podcast. I'm your host, Cody Morris, Assistant Professor of Behavior Analysis at Salve Regina University. And in today's episode, I'm going to be talking to Rick Cabena about his paper, Precision Teaching and Behavior Dynamics. This is part of that special issue focused on direct instruction and precision teaching. Rick is a professor of special education at Penn State University and director of research for Central Reach. Rick has published research articles, books and chapters on evidence based education, applied behavior analysis and precision teaching. I had a lot of fun interviewing Rick and I learned a lot. I think you will as well.

So without further ado, here is my interview with Rick Cabena.

Hello, Rick, and welcome to Behavior Analysis in Practice, the podcast.

Thank you for having me, Cody.

We're excited to have you and to talk about your article.

Before we jump into the article, we always love to hear about our guest's background, what their role is and sort of what led them to this research. So do you mind sharing a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, I grew up in a place that many people it's called. Well, I actually grew up in Canfield, but you say Youngstown, Ohio, because no one ever knows these little small places that you live in. And in Youngstown, I was an undergrad. I thought I wanted or I was a high school kid. I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. So I go to this place called Youngstown State University, which was our local college. And I had a professor there named Steve Graf. Turns out that Steve Graf was this guy who loved precision teaching and behavior analysis. We had some other behavior analysts. It was a very eclectic program, but we had maybe three behavior analysts in there. And just through mentorship from Steve, I learned more about precision teaching. And I said, hey, Steve, you know, where should I go? You know, when you get a psych undergrad, it's most of the time preparatory for another degree. And he said, you know, you want to go up to Ohio State. There's this guy there named John Cooper who does this stuff with precision teaching. So I go, OK, you know, not knowing anything. I go to Ohio State. There's Bill Heward, Tim Herron, Diane Sonato, Ralph Garner, all of these other amazing people. And I just lucked into my career just through not knowing any better. And, of course, I never went down that route of clinical psychology. And I was very fortunate to have those people in my life because it led me to where I am today.

That's awesome. And so is your graduate degrees, are they in special education then?

Yeah. So I undergrad with psych, masters in special ed, went out in practice for a number of years because in special ed, I always wanted to go back and get a doctorate. That's a degree where you can't. It's not like psychology where you could literally start as an undergrad and go all the way up to the Ph.D. You have to have practical experience. So I was in the field for a few years and then went back to Ohio State for my doctorate.

Awesome. And you want to tell the listeners what you're up to today, what your current role is and how that involves precision teaching?

Sure. I am a professor at Penn State University. I am in the special education program and I've been I've been a professor since ninety nine. But I was only at my very first job for one year. I've been at Penn State since 2000.

And in my role, I conduct research on behavior analysis, precision teaching, a whole other few things that I'm interested in. And I teach courses. I teach an undergrad course on reading. I also teach a single case, single case course. And then I work with students and I do service. Those are the three things that define us in higher education. And I'm heavy on on the research side, writing, publishing, conducting experiments. But I do those other activities also.

And one of your major research lines seems to be related to precision teaching. And you mentioned sort of being introduced to that as an undergraduate. Was that sort of when that officially connected or clicked for you that this is a really cool technology or did it continue to develop as you got more and more clinical experience? Like where did this love story begin, assuming it's a love story? Definitely. You don't stay with something that long if you don't like it. It's to some degree. I that's a really perceptive question. I was I learned about this thing called precision teaching, which is applied. It's an applied system. And I said, well, how could I use this for myself? And back when I was an undergrad, I was into golf. I said, I wonder if I could use this to get better. And sure enough, I got a lot better. And ever since then, I'm like, wow, this is the one thing that helped me get much better with this thing that I love. And I wanted to learn more about it. And of course, from there, once I actually got out in the field and started seeing how well it worked, it just confirmed everything that I learned as an undergrad and as a grad student. That's awesome.

In this particular paper, you wrote part of the special issue that came out behavior analysis and practice in December. Can you talk about maybe what your motivation was for this particular paper and why you see describing the relationship between precision teaching and behavior dynamics as being something that would be useful for behavior analysts to understand? I am a huge fan of science. In fact, I like to consider myself a scientist first, throw whatever label you want on after me, you know, behavior analyst, precision teacher, direct instruction, whatever. And if you have that type of attitude, then you're going to respect science, you're going to look more into it, you're going to look widely and see what does it have to offer. And science is, it's a very, on the one hand, it's a simple activity, but on the other hand, it's complicated activity. And science is looking at studying the physical world. And I, as I have done more reading in science, I have tended to take on the thinking of, well, how can our particular brand of science be improved? And because of the study that I've done in the past, I have found areas where we can greatly improve our science. And I hope people, I hope the listeners, when you hear something like that, you're comfortable with it because in science, it's like 99% of everything that we've discovered in science has been overturned. Just look at the history of it. It's going to happen in our field too. And you have to be comfortable with that because science has this tenet of hold on knowledge.

And this paper, a lot of times people would ask me, oh, you have a lot of people don't know about precision teaching, number one. And so I would sometimes hear people that don't like precision teaching or are indifferent to precision teaching will be dismissive of it. And they'll say things like, ah, there's really no data there. It's all anecdotal or clinical or lab directed. And understanding what behavior dynamics are, which I mean, dynamics is out of science in general. We'll talk about that more as we move forward in this podcast. But I thought, oh, this is something that needs to be said. My advisor, John Cooper, wrote a paper on behavior dynamics. And before that, there was M. Jackson Marr, Jack Marr. He wrote a paper on behavior dynamics for behavior analysis.

And other than those, I have probably the third paper on dynamics. There's like nothing else out there. So this might seem really obscure, but this is how science works. If you find something that you think is useful and can contribute to your field, write about it, study it, dive into it, and it may turn out one day to be a very big contribution. Right now, a lot of people don't know about this, but that's why you write papers and get the word out.

Absolutely. And I love the wording you used. You said science has a tentative hold on knowledge. And you kind of talked about the fact that 99% of all science is essentially overturned and proved upon. And I think that that's really true. And I think that's important for the listeners and the readers of behavior analysis and practice to grasp onto and for our field to really lean into.

Now, the paper, as you've talked about, is focused primarily on precision teaching and then the understanding of behavior dynamics. Can you provide an introduction or an explanation of what precision teaching is for the listeners who may not be familiar with the discipline?

Sure. Precision teaching is a measurement decision-making system. That's what it is. You will hear some people, a lot of times I get reviews, people will ask me to be a reviewer, and I'll also listen to people talk. And sometimes people get it wrong. People will define precision teaching as an instructional approach. It is not an instructional approach. People will define it as building fluency. That came out of precision teaching. Precision teaching is a measurement, a very precise measurement system that enables you to make very good decisions, high probability decisions. And there are four steps to it. Pinpoint, record, change, try again. And those steps came out of, from Ogden Lindsley, those steps came out of a process that allowed parents, students, teachers, other researchers to look at whatever they're interested in. You pinpoint the behavior, which is looking at very specifically, what is the behavior? Then you are going to measure it and then you record your data in a very specific, precise way. Then you put it on this specialized visual display, which is called a standard acceleration chart, which has lots of properties that are amazing. And from there, you analyze your data and say, should I keep going or do I need to make a change? And if I need to make a change, I'm going to try again until I can resolve whatever the issue is. So those are the four steps of precision teaching and they define the measurement decision-making system.

Not to belabor the point, and I think he gave a really good explanation of what precision teaching is, but having taught precision teaching or sort of introduced precision teaching to my students, I think that the struggle that many people have when learning about precision teaching is the idea that there is no one sort of instructional strategy associated with precision teaching. And I love the quote that you had in your paper, which is precision teaching does not require its users to adopt a specific curriculum or instructional method. And you provide a citation for White 2005. Where do you, I think, I think we reset that it seems to me that maybe part of the confusion is perhaps the title precision teaching, because I think the teaching piece kind of can lead people to think, oh, this is a strategy of teaching specifically. Do you have other ideas as to why there may be so much confusion about what precision teaching actually is?

Well, number one, I think you hit the nail on the head. You're absolutely right that that name implies an instructional approach. When Ogden Lindsley, when he first started out the field, you go back to the 60s, he called what he did precision behavior management. Back in the 60s, 70s, when behavior analysts and analysis was growing.

And when you looked at the first generation of people who took this science, which started off experimentally into this apply all these applied settings. He thought that, OK, adding this precision, the things that I talked about to whatever you're doing is going to allow you to do whatever that activity is better. So he came up with precision behavior management. He said, if you're doing this with social work, it would be precision social work. If you were doing this with nursing, it would be precision nursing. If you were doing this with sales, it'd be precision sales. And if you happen to be doing this in education, it would be precision teaching. Well, guess what stuck? Guess what most people did? Well, most people were in education. So the precision teaching just kind of took off. There were other people doing all of those other activities that I just mentioned, precision nursing, precision social work. But there were very few people in those fields, and it just didn't take off.

A second reason why a lot of people don't know about it is where would they come in contact with this information? It's not like in our textbooks, there's a section on precision teaching. In the current white book, the Cooper Heron Heward book, you can find some information on a standard acceleration chart, but that's it. And that isn't talking about precision teaching. There's not a lot of places to go. And in people's course of graduate studies, what professors are going to teach this? Where does it fit in?

So you have a few variables, I believe, that are responsible for people not being aware of it. One of the things you mentioned at the beginning of the interview was that some people within the field, I'm sure beyond the field, who are unfamiliar with precision teaching may not understand the research or the evidence that supports precision teaching. And you begin to outline some of that in the paper and talk about where the evidence for precision teaching comes from. Could you provide a little bit of context there for the listeners?

Yeah. When we talk about evidence, typically that means peer-reviewed studies. Do you have a base of studies that are in the literature? Now precision teaching did have its own journal. It started off as the Journal of Precision Teaching in 1980. And then they added the word acceleration. So it changed. Maybe that was in the 90s to the Journal of Precision Teaching and Acceleration. There were, you know, it was peer-reviewed. There were many people there. So you have all of these studies. Those are available, by the way, for free. If any of you are interested, you can go to acceleration.org and download those. And you can also search in ERIC and they'll come up. But beyond the journal, there are many entries into other journals. You just, depending on what you're looking at, if it's education, you can find studies of precision teaching in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Education, ETC, all of the journals. And of course, the very journal that we're talking about now has published a whole special issue. The Behavior Analysis and Practices published a whole special issue on precision teaching. There are books out there. There's lots of evidence to support precision teaching.

And I once interviewed Ogden Lindsley and I asked him this question that you're asking me. Well, a similar question, actually. I said, can precision teaching fail? Have you seen any instances of precision teaching failing? And his response was, if you engage in the steps of precision teaching, the four steps that I said, pinpoint, record, change, try again, and what you have doesn't work, the precision teaching method worked. In other words, just because you don't have positive results, if you engage in those steps, you have recorded a behavior, you've measured it, and then you made a decision, that's what precision teaching does.

And we have all sorts of, you know, there are studies that talk about that particular way of looking at the world. But then some of these discoveries that were made out of precision teaching, the frequency building to behavioral fluency, we have lots of studies there. Some people do that, and they use precision teaching to measure it. And there's probably 40 plus studies out there that I could point to right now that show these are the effects when you do this. So there's lots of evidence for precision teaching.

Somewhat implied in a lot of this conversation is the fact that precision teaching can really be utilized in a lot of different settings with a lot of different types of learners. I've personally seen it in like a typical school settings. I've seen it in autism centers. Is there, do you see the research sort of spread across those areas? You know, considering most sort of behavior analysts tend to work with individuals with autism and developmental disabilities, do we see a research base there? And I know that precision teaching is meant to be used not just with and by behavior analysts, but also regular educators and special educators. So could you talk about if we see most research in one area or the other or kind of spread across?

You do see most of the research in education. It's called precision teaching because many of the practitioners have taken it to educational settings, but you can find it in other places. And this last precision teaching conference we had, one of the main speakers was Kirk Kirby, who's part of team ABA. And he has a whole company with like-minded colleagues who are using precision teaching in sports, which is, there have been other people who've done this on the applied side. And you can find a few studies out there with sports, which is great. It mirrors ABA, in my opinion, in the sense that right now ABA is very focused on autism, spectrum disorders, but yet just because you may have 70% of the field, according to the BACB website that's focused on that, you see all of these other sub-disciplines and places where people are applying behavior analysis. It's the same thing with precision teaching, but just because precision teaching is such a smaller scale than how many behavior analysts we have, you don't see that many people doing it in these other areas.

But I'm glad you asked that question because sometimes I'll get people that say, hey, I want to do precision teaching, but I want to use it for reductive behaviors. Again, there's this misconception that you have to use precision teaching to grow behaviors. Anytime you take something and you pinpoint it and you record it through the steps of precision teaching, you put it on a chart and you make a decision, you're doing precision teaching. So it doesn't matter whether it's reductive behavior or growth behavior. It all can fit within the system.

With the sports piece, do you feel like that's a little full circle for you considering you started out with your interest in the golf? Is it exciting to see that sort of piece of the field growing a little bit?

Absolutely. There is so much promise with precision teaching. Obviously, at this point in my career, I started off as an undergrad in 85. I met Steve Graff in 86. I've been doing precision teaching since 1986. That officially makes me old. Or I like to use the term, I'm a veteran. So I've seen so much. And by so much, I mean incredible feats of change, of behavior change. But yet, many of my colleagues are not using this system. And whenever I talk, I can show people, like, look at all this. Look at this data. I can show them the logic. I can show them, if you do this, this will happen. But yet, it's still a lot to do to get people to change. As you all know, behavior change is not an easy thing. But that's why we do science. And I'm very thankful, obviously, for these kinds of opportunities to talk to your audience. And maybe when they listen to me and my colleagues, they give it a shot.

And they can see for themselves that there's something to this thing called precision teaching, which would certainly benefit their practice. Yeah. And at the end of the interview, we'll save it. We'll put a little cliffhanger in here for now. But eventually, I'll ask you if you've got any recommendations for people that are sort of new to the area that want to begin behavior analysts that want to begin sort of exploring precision teaching and the idea of using it. But we'll circle back to that.

One of the sort of core pieces, it seems like that is necessary to understand if you're going to effectively use precision teaching as a behavior analyst is this the concept of behavior dynamics. Could you could you shed a light on what behavior dynamics is and how that relates to experimental design?

Sure. If I asked you or your audience, how do you in our field of behavior analysis, how do we know if we have an effect? We have something called a functional relation. And that functional relation is a pretty big deal. And it's based off of we have this steady state behavior that we are looking for. And we it's based on the steady state logic. And what we do is we will have a baseline. We'll analyze that baseline. We will then have an intervention. And depending on how we experimentally arrange that, which design we're using, we can look at the data and say, okay, it looks like we may have a functional relation. That's one way of doing science and approaching the world.

Now dynamics, that term may not be familiar to many people, but many people may have heard of or know of thermodynamics. So think about thermodynamics in that term. What does that mean? Thermodynamics is a branch of physics. And what it does is it studies the effects of changes in temperature. We could refer to temperature as heat. It also looks at pressure, volume, and it does this with these physical systems at the macroscopic scale. And the way thermodynamics functions is it analyzes the motion of these particles. And based off of all of that, we have this field. So there's two words there. There's thermo, which gets to the heat and the pressure, the volume. In other words, these forms of energy. And then dynamics, which means mechanics. And that's concerned with the effects of these forces on motions of objects.

Now Jack Maher, when he wrote this paper, which by the way, I would recommend you all download that. I want to say it's either in Java or the experimental. I can't remember which one it is. It's probably, I could look in my paper. Well, we'll link to it as well. Okay, good. We'll link to the website you referenced, or you can download all the papers from the Precision Teaching Journal and we'll link to this paper as well. Excellent.

So with thermodynamics and with dynamics, there was a conference. This was, I think this paper was published in 89, or no, the conference was 89, maybe published paper 91. But there was a conference of like-minded behavior analysts that all got together and they were discussing, how can we approach behavior analysis in terms of these dynamics? Because we've adopted looking at behavior through steady states, there was a lot of information that back when Skinner and colleagues first started off looking at it, there were lots of states, transition states, transitory states, that were fascinating. When you looked at what the animals they were working with were doing, and just looking at behavior through the steady state lens, that shouldn't be the only way we come to understand the world. And in fact, with dynamics, I've read more about it, and it's something that fascinates me.

There's this guy who is a theoretical ecologist at the University of Connecticut. His name is Peter Turchin. And he was vexed by the fact that in history, there's over 200 explanations for why the Roman Empire has collapsed. People will often think of things like history, like, well, history is not even a science.

But he was thinking, well, you know what, we can apply science to history. And he came up with this new term called Clio dynamics. So Clio was the muse of history, and dynamics was getting at these regular predictable patterns that you could make. And I just loved reading about his approach, because we can apply all of that thinking to behavior analysis and look at, just because we don't have a single case design study going, that doesn't lock in our truth. That is not the only way to discover knowledge. And in fact, if it was, if through those kinds of experimentation was the only way that we could create and discover knowledge, we would have a problem. And I talk about this in the paper.

Is paleontology a science? Paleontologists aren't doing active experiments. Or how about astronomy? Is astronomy a science? And if you want to say you have to do active experimentation, then you're going to be dismissing all these branches of science. And with thinking about these through the, looking at this through the lens of dynamics, we can have a lot of information that might not necessarily come to us through the single case experimental designs. And that's part of what Jack Maher was saying. Like Skinner, guess what? Skinner didn't do a multiple baseline back in the day. Skinner wasn't doing a changing criterion back in the day. We didn't dismiss the entire foundation of our science because we didn't have these experimental designs. No, we had, there were so many interesting things that we were studying back then. So this paper, when I talk about dynamics, is a way to look at and consider that there are other avenues to information and knowledge creation and precision teaching happens to be, I feel, part of that story.

When you talked about the fact that Skinner really wasn't using single subject designs as we understand them today, in your paper, I thought back instantly to some of the earlier work that I read by Skinner. And I was like, you're absolutely right. It's, it's a fascinating point that you bring up that the foundation of our science, in many situations, wasn't utilizing single subject designs. What we would today consider demonstrating functional relations, or at least demonstrating experimental control.

So within the paper, you also talked about some of the difficulties that, in particular, teachers would experience if trying to utilize standard single subject experimental designs. Could you elaborate on those a little bit and sort of cue our listeners into what some of those issues are?

Yeah. It's a really good question. If I could step back and answer your question by going back to the difference between natural science and social science. We have two definitions of that. When we talk about natural science, we think about this branch of science that's dealing with the physical world. So physics, chemistry, geology, biology, a bunch of studies that are dealing with the natural world.

When we talk about social science, it's exactly what it says. It's this branch of science is dealing with the social world. So psychology, economics, archaeology, political science, and some people have, have come up with natural, we have this distinction, and some people have used hard science versus soft science and then it, it, sometimes the soft science is meant to be used in a pejorative, but we do have the sciences that operate, or have these different focuses. And behavior analysis is, even though we're dealing with people, started off as a natural science. And I think that's important for people to understand.

And in the natural sciences, many people will hold up physics as the queen of all of the natural sciences, because it has this incredible resume, has done all these things. And it's, you get lots of prediction and control, but the difference between working with an atom versus working with the person is how much control can you exert on your specific subject matter.

And you can, you have many, you understand many of the factors that are going in with that atom and when you conduct your study, you can have, you can set it up so okay when I do these things and run this experiment, here's what I find. Whereas when we're working with people, we try to control as many variables as we can, but there's so many variables we just cannot control. And because of that, we will, we will have more variability in, in our results than you could find in, in the natural science, or I shouldn't say that. Again, I'm going to put in behavior analysis as a natural science. And by that, I mean, the way we conduct our research is different from the way people would conduct like some of many of the people in psychology using statistics and inferential statistics, particularly versus what we're doing, which is very similar to the ideas in physics, where we're focusing in on this one thing. And we're trying to control as many variables as we can. We're working with one person and or one, one, one specific target, I guess, is a way to think about it.

So teachers, teachers, when you take precision teaching and you're working in the applied, these applied settings, there's so much control that they don't have. And this is the same thing that happens with behavior analysts. There's only so much control you can exert. And as a result, you try to do what you you try to run these experiments and do the best job that you can. But there's all of these things that are going on out there that we just have no control of the student comes to school, and no one fed that no one fed that student. How are you going to account for that? And if the student doesn't say anything, and that student can have a bad day, that student could could could do engage very poorly and not respond to whatever you set up whatever your experimental invention is has nothing to do with the experimental invention. But you can't control that. And you might not know that. And that's what happens when we work in these applied settings, we try to do our best. But because these teachers have many things that are going on, they can still be applied, they can still be applied scientists and go in there and try to control as many variables as they can. But there could be things that creep in there, which would increase the variability that we see.

And you state in the paper that ultimately utilizing a behavior dynamics approach rather than a traditional single subject experimental design is much more suited to the applied needs of teachers using precision teaching. Could you could you elaborate on that? Can you explain why that is and how ultimately behavior dynamics help us understand the change that we are seeing?

Yeah. This is the nuanced perspective that I hope people get. Let's say that you have 1000 1000 reports of something happening. You go to your social media and someone says, hey, here's here's 1000 reports of something happening, whatever that is, when people drink Turkish coffee, they have better days. Are you going to believe that? Or not? A lot of people, depending on how that evidence is based, you need to be skeptical of it. And there could be something there.

Now, what about Skinner? What did Skinner do? Well, if we go back to our early days, Skinner when in again, I'm using Skinner, and it wasn't just Skinner, he had many colleagues that followed suit and helped to form but of course, Skinner, being the father of the science and coming up with these incredible ideas when no one else had them deserves the credit to being the founder of our field. And looking at his early experiments, we can see that he applied an extremely impressive array of control. We had this experimental chamber, you know, Skinner was trying to control the ambient sound, the temperature, the lighting, how much the animal ate, looking at just as much control as you could exert with that animal. And Skinner discovered things.

And of course, everyone who was doing this, if you have now 1000 people applying strong science, that's something that we should pay attention to that, in my opinion, is evidence that's convincing evidence. It's not like I said, where you have 1000 people who are maybe giving their opinion on something versus 1000 people now who are applying this very strong science in generating this evidence. And my point is with precision teaching, we have many instances of these teachers and other folks who are applying science to individuals as maybe not like Skinner, because they don't have all that control. But we should look at what they're doing and not be dismissive of it and be like, oh, well, you know, there's 1000 people's opinions. No, if you're applying precision teaching, and you're taking data, you're engaging in a very inductive approach. And it's a way higher level of evidence than if you're just asking for people's opinions.

So that's the idea with these dynamics. And if you have all this information that's based on the science and it's inductive, you can start having confidence in that information. So if precision teachers are doing something specifically, and again, you have to look at the literature and you have to look at what the topic is. And I'm not saying everything that everyone does in precision teaching falls under this framework that I'm talking about, but a lot does. It's the same thing with behavior analysis, not everything that everyone does in behavior analysis, you're instantly going to say, oh, well, that has credibility. We always have to be open-mindedly skeptical. We always have to be looking at the data. We have to be looking at the lineage of that data and studies and seeing how, what's the track record of it? How's it developed? Do you have direct replication, systematic replications, and so on?

And that's what I'm introducing with this paper and the term behavior dynamics. With behavior dynamics, if you're sort of, to my understanding, and I guess I should apologize to the readers, I feel like this is a very visual conversation, at least for me, understanding research design is so visual and seeing, sort of seeing the experimental control. And so you can, of course, pull up the article, Rick does lay out sort of what the traditional visual representations are for the single subject design. If we were to try to visualize what a behavior dynamics approach looks like, is there a comparison or is there a way of sort of understanding what that might actually look like on paper or on a graph?

Yeah, so the four main single case experimental designs that we have are there. They're not, and I say they're the main ones because many people have all of these other ones that, you know, some are iterations on those designs and then some are kind of their own design, but you hear like, well, that kind of looks like this design over here. Johnson and Pennypacker, you know, they have a number of editions of their fabulous book. And in there, they have this scientific notation for how you can diagram and come up with your own experimental designs, which is a really cool system. So depending on what you're doing, you could have that diagramming system and you could say, well, here is my specific design and here are all these other particular folks that do it. And if we use that system, then we would have a visual representation of what this could look like.

Now, here's the thing with precision teaching that I love, and I feel everyone in the audience should move to the standard celebration chart or something similar to this because of this reason. Well, there's actually three reasons I'm going to talk about. One, quantification of whatever you're working with. I just recently did a study and, you know, we're not talking about that, but I'll just tease people with this study where we compared linear graphs with using your own subjective analysis, like, oh, is that increasing moderately, mildly, or really strongly?

"Those aren't the words we use, but that's the idea. Versus, oh, is this a times 1.4? You tell people this is a times 1.4. Is it times 1.8? No, it's a times 1.4. Guess what happens when you quantify your subject matter? Like 100% of people get what that thing is, whereas when you ask people's opinion, guess what happens? Well, it's the same thing in our field. If you go back to this, again, when we talk about the track record, we have many studies that show in terms of people having agreement on the effects, it's like between 50 and 60%. Some people I've seen studies that are even below that. They're like 40%. And we've had this longstanding problem because you don't have these, we don't have decision rules. We have non-standardization with our graphs. Everyone makes up their own one. And you can't have a textbook where people are telling everyone, well, this is how it should be. This is how it should look. Because one graph is scaled from 0 to 3. The next graph is from 0 to 100. So you have all of these issues."

"And getting back to your question with precision teaching, not only do we have visual analysis that's standard, but we can quantify everything. And this is where I hope people get really excited about what the standard acceleration chart has. Like, okay, let's say you don't want to go down the route of precision teaching and do the pinpointing and the recording. Use this chart and elevate what you're doing. Elevate your practice. Because if you think that using your opinion is better than numbers, you're going to be wrong. And every single science out there that has been progressively better has gotten rid of people's opinion and has exquisitely quantified their subject matter. Don't take my word for it. Go out there and just see people who've been successful and look at their degree of quantification and see, are any of them relying on the opinions of people? Now, people, we do have to interpret what we're finding. Yes, we have that. But in terms of the subject matter and using that as our data and coming to understand and analyze that, again, going back and contrasting this with what Skinner did, Skinner had a standard. He used rate and he had a standard visual display, was the cumulative recorder. We've completely moved away from that."

"At any rate, these are the things that I start to get really excited about. And I don't want to go into a rant here, but your questions brought me to that line of thinking. And hopefully that's okay to share with the listeners."

"Absolutely. Yeah. And I particularly enjoyed it. I'm finishing up the book Noise by Daniel Kahneman right now. Love that book. Yeah. And he talks about sort of error and judgment and the fact that while experts tend to want to trust their own opinions and judgments about things, the reality is, most of the time, there's going to be variation in what experts say. And therefore, you can sort of assume there's going to be error in what they're saying. And as you were saying, if the experts in our field or the practitioners in our field are exuding decision-making power about how they're graphing and analyzing their data, we have to assume there's going to be variation and therefore error within that analysis."

"Yeah. Let me also add this. I come off pretty strong on this because I want people to see that we can do things in a better way, but I am in no way saying we don't have one heck of a science and we don't have a lot of power. We have an incredibly robust database. Even with the limitations of the linear graphs that we have, we figured things out. And of course, we have all of this work beforehand and we have people moving in other directions. People are applying statistical models. If you look at the experimental analysis of behavior now, you can find many journals or many articles in the journals where people are doing that."

Again, I believe we can elevate our science, but I'm in no way casting any aspersions on the things that we do because we have one heck of a strong science and I'm very proud to be part of it.

Yeah, and I'll echo those sentiments. I think that sometimes criticism or a push to improve in certain areas can be taken as sort of a dislike of the field or something like that, which I don't think is in any way accurate. My mentor, Stephanie Peterson, when she would edit our papers or something like that, she would write on the first page sometimes, ink equals love. I love that. The more that I sort of edit and the more that I critique in your paper, it's because I care about you. I care about this paper. I care about this research. And I think the same can be true with this conversation.

Are there things that need to improve about behavior analysis? Absolutely. And I think those that are trying to improve the field, I think that's, in most cases, out of love. That is so well stated. And that's exactly how I feel about it. And we can never rest on our laurels. We're an applied field. Well, we have people that do basic. But when we talk about many people who are out there earning a living on behavior analysis, many of those folks are applied. And as a result, you have people who do science. And it is the job of people like myself, yourself and other people who are actively doing research to always push the borders of our science and always look to improve it.

Because honestly, if you don't have that, if you have stasis, you're a dead field. And I'm glad to hear you articulate it that way because that's something that when you play by the rules of science, there's criticism in there. If you've ever engaged in peer review, people are going to criticize what you do because that's part of science. And when you have ideas, I always like to say that science is the marketplace of ideas. And the good ideas eventually are going to rise to the top and people are going to buy those not because of some flashy speaker, not because of some marketing campaign, but because in science, everything is ruled by empirical data. And those are the things that are going to always drive us.

Well said. I want to be respectful of your time and I want to make sure that we give you an opportunity to maybe provide some some thoughts or resources that you might want to share with our listeners in respect to if if someone is hearing about precision teaching for the first time. You know, this is a behavior analytic podcast. So let's say it's a behavior analyst, interesting and somehow incorporating precision teaching into their practice.

Do you have any off the cuff recommendations on here's probably where you should start other than reading this special issue in behavior analysis and practice? Yeah. Journals are a great place to start. There are many in the past, there have been other special issues in other journals that have an array of articles. This particular one has some conceptual papers like my own, but yet there's also database articles, and if you, there are some really good articles out there, there are some teaching exceptional children. Maybe two of them, one was done in the 70s, one was done in the 90s. And you can find articles out there that describe precision teaching in a very elegant way. You can start their books are another place, you know, shameless plug, I've written three, I'd love for you to buy any one of them.

My most recent book has been a collection of blogs, which I went back, I read what I blogged about for 20 years and I've edited them and I've put a little postscript on those and talked about what I learned from them. And that was a fun experience to see how my thinking has grown and changed from one early in my career to now.

If you're into social media, I don't know what's out there on TikTok, but certainly in Facebook, there's groups, you could go to Instagram, there are people that are putting things out there.

That's another avenue, probably YouTube. Again, I haven't searched these in a while, but you might be able to find some information. Maybe not a lot, but some things that might whet your appetite and start helping you think, oh, or even do you want to pursue this? Do you want to look more about this? And it's always helpful to engage people. And if any of you can find a mentor, generally speaking, this is my life advice. I don't care what age you are, find someone who knows something and let them mentor you. We should all be having mentors from our entire lives, but that certainly would be very helpful if you could get someone that could mentor you. Engage in verbal communities wherever you can find them.

There are conferences, the most recent Precision Teaching Conference, it's always held annually in November. It was just at St. Pete. Next year, it's going to be in Denver. Go to those conferences. You can find some workshops. Now, again, this happened a lot more with the pandemic. It hasn't been, like myself, I was presenting maybe 10 to 12 times in person a year, but that has changed a lot. But still, we're moving into the endemic phase of the pandemic, which means we're just going to live our lives with this thing. And you're seeing conferences pick up, listen to speakers.

So there's many places that you can go to. Acceleration.org, I mentioned that earlier. That's called the Standard Acceleration Society, and that is the body that governs precision teaching. They put on workshops. They do outreach. There are some, I believe there might even be some scholarships there. I'd have to check. But at any rate, those would be some of the ways that you could learn more about precision teaching.

Excellent resources. We'll link to as many of those as we can in the show notes. We'll link to the website. We'll link to your books so that the listeners have easy access there.

Now, in terms of looking at the future of precision teaching, I know that one of your motivations is to sort of disseminate this information so that behavior analysts can utilize precision teaching to help the clients that they're working with. Are there sort of major next steps that you think the sort of subdiscipline of precision teaching needs to take?

Precision teaching, if we look at it in a whole as a method that's being used in applied settings, there can always be more studies. Where do you apply those studies? Where are you going to grow? And do you want to apply them in education? Do you want to apply it in healthcare? Where do you want to put it? I don't necessarily have that answer. I've done a lot of work in education, a lot with behavior change, and I'd like to see it grow. Presently, I also work with Central Reach, and Central Reach is a technology platform, and I am very interested in how technology can help shape what we're doing, and technology with precision teaching, I feel, is an area that's going to help it grow.

For years, many people struggled to engage with precision teaching, because if you've ever seen that chart, the first time you've seen it and no one's ever showed it to you, you're like, you know what, I don't even want to go down that road, because it is a daunting chart. It has all these lines, they're close together, it has a ratio view, and it takes explaining. For many years, as a professor, I would spend two and a half lectures, and these were three-hour classes, on trying to get people just at a minimum competence. Once you have that, you need to maintain your competence, you have to start doing it, and it takes a lot of work to use that paper chart. These are one of the big reasons why I feel many people aren't using precision teaching, because there's this huge response effort that you have to engage in. Frankly, if no one's pushing you to do it, behavior is like water, it's going to follow this course, this path of least resistance. So why are you going to do that?

Technology, now that we have that, can make precision teaching so much easier, where you cut out all of those. In fact, a software that I co-created with a business partner from State College, Dave Stevens, we created Chartlytics, and of course, it was acquired by Central Reach, and it's now called Precision X. We've done studies where you have an RBT, and within five minutes, they're using the rudiments of precision teaching. That's what technology can do. So I feel that there's a huge step forward that precision teaching can make with technology.

Now, again, there's so much to that question you asked. There's so many different areas that we could look at. I did a study on pinpointing, which is part of precision teaching, and found that, guess what, pinpointing did better than operational definitions. Our entire field is enamored with operational definitions. Well, maybe enamored's the wrong word. They're using them. They're in our textbooks, they're out there. There could be a lot more research on that. There's just so much that can be done.

And anytime you have a scientific field, when you understand the breadth of what that science has to offer, you just see all of these possibilities, all of these different paths, which it can go down. So it's a really good question, and if people are veteran precision teachers, many of those folks are going down, again, a specific way of a line of research where that's what they're doing. We just need more people applying precision teaching and engaging in the research, and there's many areas that would be fruitful.

It's exciting to hear about what the future of precision teaching holds, and I am especially excited, as you described, the sort of innovations in technology and how that may interact with precision teaching to make it more accessible to certain groups using it. So that's exciting.

Is there anything else before we wrap up that you'd like to share with the listeners about precision teaching in this article or anything else? I hope that everyone reads the articles that are in the special issue. I had a chance to read them. And when you're in a field, it's always amazing to see what other people are doing. Anytime you talk to people, no one's going to have the same idea of, everyone is going to have their own interpretation of whatever their subject matter is. And that's part of being a human, you know, science is a human activity.

And I will sometimes have disagreements with my colleagues and my colleagues will disagree with me, but that's all part of science and reading and learning more about it is so important. And this special issue is just so dynamic. And I loved reading some of what my colleagues are doing. And I hope the listeners have a chance to read and digest what many of these articles are saying, because you'll start seeing commonalities among the precision teaching focused articles and see how are people thinking about it, what are they doing with it. And that will help people grow and expand their appreciation for what precision teaching can do.

I echo those sentiments. I think it was an excellent special issue. And so thank you for your contribution to it. And thank you for coming on the podcast today. It's been a pleasure.

Thank you for having me. Before you go too far, please remember to subscribe and like us on whatever podcast player you use to listen. Find us and follow us on social media to stay up to date on our latest episodes and to suggest recent BAP papers that we should review. The links to our social media are in our show notes.

Finally, I'd like to thank a few people for helping create this podcast. Thank you to Stephanie Peterson, the editor of the journal Behavior Analysis and Practice. Thank you to ABAI for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you to my assistant producers, Elizabeth Nervaez and Jesse Perrin, and to my production assistant for this episode, Beyonce Ferrucci.

And as always, thank you to Jim Carr and his band, New Latitude, for letting us sample their song, Cruising Altitude, throughout this podcast. Thank you. Thank you.