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Reinforcement Assessment Paper

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Although this project included a variety of assessment methods, there were some potential limitations. First, there were no ongoing preference assessments before conducting the reinforcement assessment in different days. Kennedy and Haring (1993) indicated that individuals with profound intellectual disabilities could change not over time, even within the course of one day. In addition, these individuals also demonstrated habituations and novelty effects which may influence the validity of further reinforcing testing or assessments (Logan et al., 2001). Therefore, it is important to reassess participant’s preferences frequently to ensure the experimenter is always using the preferred items. However, it is relatively time-consuming to conduct …show more content…

Third, the reinforcement assessment results showed that the participant might have a difficulty on understanding the task. Additional research can be done to include a thinning schedule in the reinforcement assessment. Specifically, experimenter can conduct a rich reinforcement schedule (such as FI 10s) at the beginning of the assessment and then gradually increase participant’s engagement time to get a reinforcer by using FI 20s, FI 30s and FI 40s schedules. This method may help participant to have more exposure on the tasks and reinforcers and understand the contingency at the beginning of the sessions. Fourth, the quality of the observational data should be taken into consideration as some of the interobserver agreement data in this project were low (below 85%). Cooper, Heron and Heward (2014) indicated that experimenters and clinicians should always choose the valid assessment of IOA to ensure the reliability of the observation data and their interpretations

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