This course is a thorough treatment of the technology of constructing a comprehensive behavior change program. There are three stages to managing a behavior change project: functional assessment; behavior change programming; and post-intervention maintenance. This course will explore the last two stages. It starts with strategies for going systematically from your contingency statement of the problem and working with clients to set quantitative behavior objectives and choose the appropriate behavior change procedures. The most powerful behavior change procedures will be discussed in detail, including differential reinforcement and systematic desensitization. It proceeds to implementation of the program and monitoring the behavior to ensure the objectives are being met. It ends with devising a maintenance program for after the intervention procedures are completed. This course includes a workshop in differential reinforcement: In this practical, mechanical skills development workshop students will apply the principles of behavior, and the techniques of animal training learned in previous courses to address a complex training task involving differential reinforcement. The training task will involve training an animal to target with a nose or paw touch a specific object on cue in the presence of two objects and then extinguish the targeting, while differentially reinforcing targeting of the other object, transferring stimulus control to a verbal cue, followed by generalizing the performance to different settings (including away from home) to meet specific response criteria. Differential reinforcement is often used to resolve problem behavior situations. In this course we train our own innocuous

Sponsor:Companion Animal Sciences Institute
Speaker(s):**James O'Heare

Contact: James O'Heare
 Email: jamesoheare@gmail.com
 Web: http://www.casinstitute.com/