Saturday, August 17, 2013

BCBA CEU Webinar Review- FIT BEHP1059- Behavioral Analysis of Linguistic Structure

There are a whole host of places now to watch pre-recorded webinars for CEUs for behavior analysis.  Besides choosing webinars on relevant topics, how does one choose which is the best when multiple sources cover similar topics?  I decided I would review a few of the ones that I have done, in case anyone is looking to make some decisions.  I'm starting off with a 3 CEU pre recorded webinar on Behavioral Analysis of Liguistic Structure.

First of all, the process to register for the webinars at FIT is fairly straight forward, and the price of $13 per credit I found to be a good value, but the process of FINDING the webinars and selecting one can be difficult.  There's different pages that have the webinars listed in different ways, so I found I had trouble re-tracing my steps trying to choose from their many options.  They have them listed by category, by topic, alphabetically.  Overall, though, this one of only two very small negatives I have.  Signing in to the webinars is straight forward.  Navigating the webinar was the other slight negative, and you will have to forgive me as it was 3 months ago when I completed this webinar and can no longer sign in to see the course so I am going off of memory.  Watching the videos was straight forwards enough.  They instruct you to print out an AR worksheet, but in reality all you need to do is number a piece of paper to keep track of the AR questions.  The rest of the course website is just a little odd, I found.  I wasn't sure why they arranged it how it was, but it didn't get in the way of accessing the content and earning credits so it really didn't detract from the value of the course itself.

Now on to the actual content of this course, and let me say, I loved it.  I found the information to be so valuable that I am using it with the majority of my clients and have suggested to my supervisors to include the topic as one of our future trainings.  The webinar is presented by Dr Vincent Carbone, a name most of us are quite familiar with.  He was very clear in his delivery, making the topic easy to grasp, and showed sufficient examples to have an idea of how to apply what was learned. Though you can look for yourself on the course description to see what the course covers (see here) the crux of it is that it teaches the how and why of teaching a natural progression of language using verbal behavior as opposed to the method of teaching a rote sentence where the child plugs in a label into an already learned sentence stem such as "I want ____."  It explains why teaching language by plugging words in this way is counter productive because the words in that sentence other than the label do not serve the function that they should in natural, successful, language development.  I found the course to provide a wealth of useful information and it also has left me wanting to learn even more about what was covered.

This information is so valuable as far as teaching kids how to effectively communicate new things, not just the ones they have already learned.  Not only does it make language more functional for the child, but it has the side benefit of giving a boost to our image in ABA.  One of the comments you still hear from some people when talking about ABA is that it can make kids robotic.

If you are well versed in verbal behavior, specifically beyond the mand, tact, and intraverbal, this course may cover information that you already know.  If that is the case, the course may make a good review, or may explain things in a way that solidifies your understanding.  Or it may just not be right for you.  For me, I found it to be excellent overall.

I you have also completed this webinar for BCBA CEUs feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts!  Also if you know of similar webinars available, leave a link!

~KVL