McDougale Cassidy B, Richling Sarah M, Longino Emily B, O'Rourke Soracha A
Department of Psychology, Auburn University, 226 Thach Hall, Auburn, AL 36849-5214 USA.
Behav Anal Pract. 2019 May 29;13(2):402-410. doi: 10.1007/s40617-019-00365-2. eCollection 2020 Jun.
Behavioral practitioners and researchers often define skill acquisition in terms of meeting specific mastery criteria. Only 2 studies have systematically evaluated the impact of any dimension of mastery criteria on skill maintenance. Recent survey data indicate practitioners often adopt lower criterion levels than are found to reliably produce maintenance. Data regarding the mastery criteria adopted by applied researchers are not currently available. This study provides a descriptive comparison of mastery criteria reported in behavior-analytic research with that utilized by practitioners. Results indicate researchers are more likely to adopt higher levels of accuracy across fewer observations, whereas practitioners are more likely to adopt lower levels of accuracy across more observations. Surprisingly, a large amount of research (a) lacks technological descriptions of the mastery criterion adopted and (b) does not include assessments of maintenance following acquisition. We discuss implications for interpretations within and across research studies.
行为治疗师和研究人员通常根据达到特定的掌握标准来定义技能习得。只有两项研究系统地评估了掌握标准的任何维度对技能维持的影响。最近的调查数据表明，治疗师采用的标准水平往往低于被发现能可靠地产生维持效果的水平。目前尚无关于应用研究人员采用的掌握标准的数据。本研究对行为分析研究中报告的掌握标准与治疗师使用的标准进行了描述性比较。结果表明，研究人员更有可能在较少的观察次数中采用较高的准确性水平，而治疗师更有可能在较多的观察次数中采用较低的准确性水平。令人惊讶的是，大量研究（a）缺乏对所采用的掌握标准的技术描述，（b）不包括习得后维持情况的评估。我们讨论了这些结果对研究内部和跨研究解释的影响。
