New assessment systems for residential treatment,management, research,and evaluation: A symposium

An introduction and overview are presented to new observational assessment systems for ongoing assessment and monitoring of both staff and resident (client or patient) functioning in residential treatment programs for emotionally disturbed and mentally retarded adults.Preparation of articles and the research and development on which the articles are based was supported, in part, by Public Health Service Grants MH-15553 and MH-25464 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grants from the Joyce Foundation and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.A symposium presented at the 87th Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, New York City, September 1979.     

Systems use to objectify program evaluation,clinical, and management decisions

The utility of the observational assessment systems at different levels — from local clinical to systemwide management — is outlined. An overview is provided of TSBC information applied to individualized problem identification and programming/monitoring, discharge and competency determinations, and both absolute and comparative program evaluation. The utility of SRIC information for prgoramming/monitoring and for staff training and evaluation is outlined in addition to the applied uses of the information of the assessment systems in combination. Once implemented, the continuous data from the systems allow for empirically based self-corrective improvements in the quality of mental health services while automatically providing a basis for legal documentation and accurate cost/effectiveness comparisons of mental health programs.Preparation of this article and the research and development on which the article is based were supported, in part, by Public Health Service Grants MH-15553 and MH-25464 from the National Institute of Mental Health, and by grants from The Joyce Foundation and the Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.Presented at the 87th Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, New York City, September 1979, as part of a symposium on New assessment systems for residential treatment, management, research, and evaluation.     

Object disappearance and error in Piaget's Stage IV task

Piaget attributes perseverative error in infant manual search to the failure of the infant to conceive of objects as permanent entities which retain their identity when hidden at successive locations A and B. An experiment was performed to test this explanation in which search was compared under three conditions: when the object was hidden at A and B, when the object was covered but visible at A and B, and when the object was visible and uncovered at A and B. Errors occurred under all three conditions taking the form of a conflict in which infants searched persistently either at A or at B. The conflict was at a maximum when the object was hidden, but was evident even when the object was visible but covered. It is suggested that errors may reflect lack of coordination between egocentric and visual frames of reference in relation to which the object is located.     

Effects of differential reinforcement and task difficulty on preschoolers' compliance with teacher instructions

Preschool children in day schools were given instructions to complete certain tasks. Four tasks were given of two types and two levels of difficulty. In each condition compliance with at most one instruction (one task) was reinforced. In two similar experiments, with six children, general results were: compliance with easy tasks was maintained without reinforcement when any task compliance was reinforced; compliance for hard tasks remained high only when that specific task was reinforced. Thus, generalization of compliance with instructions varied with task difficulty. The setting and procedure for both studies were designed to reduce possible coercive features of laboratory studies of generalized performance. Results show generalized performance can occur under naturalistic conditions. The effect of effort, as a response characteristic affecting generalized performance, is discussed.     

Control of observing by antecedent stimuli

Five pigeons were run on a one-key discrete trials observing procedure. Trial onset was signaled by a white or yellow key light. Pecks in white or yellow intermittently produced S⁺ and S⁻, green and red key lights that signaled whether the trial would end with response-independent grain reinforcement or nonreinforcement. In the Redundant conditions, white and yellow were correlated with trial outcome, making S⁺ and S⁻ redundant. In the Informative condition, white and yellow were uncorrelated with trial outcome, so that S⁺ and S⁻ provided new information. During the Informative condition, all birds responded in the formerly positive, now uncorrelated color at higher rates than they did during the preceding or succeeding Redundant conditions, in which that same color was positively correlated with primary reinforcement. This result confirmed the prediction that an animal will observe at higher rates in the absence of reinforcement-correlated cues than in their presence.     

Reinforcing fluency in stutterers: An experimental study

Subject-specific periods of fluent reading responses of three adult stutterers were positively reinforced with the presentation of a dime. Subjects were run individually through a sequence of two base rate, two experimental, and two extinction sessions, each session lasting 45 min. Periods of fluent reading responses increased during the experimental condition for each of the three subjects. When the reinforcer was withdrawn during the extinction condition, the frequency of fluent periods showed a decrease. Concomitantly, disfluencies decreased during the experimental condition and they increased during the extinction condition. The clinical implications of fluency manipulation as against disfluency manipulation are discussed.     

Effect of sample presentation time on long-delay matching in the pigeon

The effect of sample stimulus presentation time on long-delay matching in highly practiced pigeons was investigated. The birds were found capable of above chance matching performance at a delay of 60 sec provided the sample stimulus was presented for 4 sec or longer. Matching accuracy increased as a negatively accelerated function of sample stimulus presentation time and decreased as a negatively accelerated function of time since the termination of the sample. The rate of forgetting was found to be independent of sample stimulus presentation time. The data were inconsistent with a temporal discrimination interpretation of the effect of presentation time on delayed matching. The data were interpreted as supporting a simple trace strength and decay model of pigeon delayed matching.     

Infants’ behavioral styles in joint attention situations and parents’ socio-economic status

In this study the eco-cultural model of parenting (Keller, H. (2007). Cultures of infancy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum) was applied to the study of joint attention behavior of children from families with different socio-economic status (SES). It was hypothesized that infants’ early communication styles would differ with SES reflecting more independent or interdependent interactions with their caregivers. It was also hypothesized that infants would use the same types of behaviors whether they have declarative or imperative communication goals. The Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS, Mundy et al., 2003) was administered to 103 typically developing infants of 12 months (approximately half of them siblings of children with autism). A factor analysis, yielding four behavioral factors, namely pointing, eye contact, actions and following points, confirmed the hypothesis that infants use behaviors consistently across situations independent of their communicative intent. MANOVAs (comprising parental education and income) revealed that higher SES infants showed actions more frequently in the ESCS whereas lower SES infants followed experimenter's points more frequently. The results are discussed in the context of presumably differing socialization goals for infants and the divergent contribution of parental education and income that seem to have additive contribution to some factors (actions, following points) but divergent contributions to others (pointing, eye contact).