Free RBT Flashcards
Drill the ABA vocabulary that shows up across the RBT exam. Tap a card to flip it, shuffle the deck, or narrow it to one domain. 102 cards, no signup.
Term
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- Abolishing Operation (AO): A motivating operation that decreases the value of a reinforcer, like a big meal making food less powerful for a while.
- Antecedent: What happens right before a behavior. It sets the stage and can make a behavior more or less likely.
- Antecedent Intervention: Changing the environment before a behavior to make the problem behavior less likely or unnecessary, such as offering choices or pre-teaching.
- Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): The science of applying learning principles to improve socially important behavior, then measuring whether the change actually happened.
- Assent: A learner's willingness to take part, shown through cooperation rather than formal consent. Watching for assent and its withdrawal keeps services respectful.
- Backward Chaining: Completing all steps for the learner except the last, teaching that final step first, then working backward. The learner always finishes the routine, which can be motivating.
- Baseline: Data collected before any intervention starts. Baseline is the comparison point that shows whether a later change is real.
- Behavior: Anything a person does that can be observed and measured. If you cannot see or count it, it is not yet a usable behavior definition.
- Behavior Intervention Plan (BIP): A written plan that describes the target behavior, its function, prevention strategies, replacement skills, and how the team will respond. The RBT follows it as written.
- Chaining: Teaching a sequence of steps from a task analysis so they link together into one smooth routine.
- Client Dignity: Treating clients with respect, privacy, and choice at every step. Programs should build skills without embarrassing or demeaning the person.
- Confidentiality: Protecting client information so it is shared only with people who are authorized and need it. It covers conversations, notes, photos, and electronic records.
- Consequence: What happens right after a behavior. Consequences are how behavior gets strengthened or weakened over time.
- Continuous Measurement: Recording every instance of a behavior during the whole observation, such as frequency, duration, or latency. It gives the most complete picture.
- Continuous Reinforcement (CRF): Reinforcing every single correct response. It builds new behavior quickly but is hard to sustain long term.
- Cultural Humility: Approaching each client and family with respect for their values and an awareness of your own assumptions. It means staying curious rather than assuming you already understand.
- Cumulative Record: A graph where responses are added on top of each other over time, so the line only rises. A steeper slope means a higher rate of responding.
- Data Sheet: The form used to record behavior or skill data during a session. A good data sheet matches the measurement method and is easy to score in the moment.
- Deprivation: When time without a reinforcer raises its value, making related behavior more likely.
- Differential Reinforcement: Reinforcing one class of behavior while withholding reinforcement for another. It builds up a desirable behavior as the problem behavior fades.
- Differential Reinforcement of Alternative Behavior (DRA): Reinforcing a specific acceptable behavior that gives the learner the same outcome as the problem behavior.
- Differential Reinforcement of Incompatible Behavior (DRI): Reinforcing a behavior that physically cannot happen at the same time as the problem behavior.
- Differential Reinforcement of Low Rates (DRL): Reinforcing a behavior only when it happens at or below a target rate. It fits behaviors that are fine in moderation but a problem in excess.
- Differential Reinforcement of Other Behavior (DRO): Delivering reinforcement when the problem behavior does not occur for a set period. The reward is for the absence of the behavior.
- Direct Assessment: Observing and recording behavior as it happens in the natural setting. It avoids the recall problems of indirect methods.
- Discontinuous Measurement: Sampling behavior during part of the observation rather than all of it, as in interval recording or time sampling. It trades some accuracy for practicality.
- Discrete Trial Training (DTT): Teaching in short, structured trials, each with a clear instruction, a response, and a consequence, separated by a brief pause. It suits skills that benefit from many practice opportunities.
- Discriminative Stimulus (SD): A cue that signals reinforcement is available for a particular response. The learner comes to respond in its presence and not in its absence.
- Dual Relationship: Having a second relationship with a client or family beyond the professional one, such as becoming friends or doing business. Dual relationships can cloud judgment and are usually avoided.
- Duration: How long a behavior lasts from start to finish. Useful when the concern is how long something goes on rather than how often.
- Echoic: Repeating a sound or word that was just heard. Echoics help build vocal imitation, a foundation for other language.
- Errorless Learning: Arranging prompts so the learner almost never makes a mistake while acquiring a skill. Fewer errors can mean faster, less frustrating learning.
- Establishing Operation (EO): A motivating operation that increases the value of a reinforcer, like hunger making food more powerful.
- Extinction: Withholding the reinforcement that used to follow a behavior, so the behavior gradually decreases. Extinction only works once you know what was maintaining the behavior.
- Extinction Burst: A temporary spike in the behavior right after extinction starts, often louder or more frequent. Knowing it can happen helps teams not give up too early.
- Fixed Interval (FI): Reinforcement for the first response after a set amount of time has passed. Responding often picks up as the interval ends.
- Fixed Ratio (FR): Reinforcement after a set number of responses, like every fifth correct answer.
- Forward Chaining: Teaching the first step of a chain to mastery while completing the rest for the learner, then adding the next step. Progress moves from the beginning to the end.
- Free Operant Observation: Watching a learner play freely with available items and timing how long they engage with each. High engagement suggests preference without any forced choice.
- Frequency: A simple count of how many times a behavior happens. Frequency is only comparable across sessions when the observation time is the same.
- Frequency Recording: Tallying each time a behavior occurs during an observation. Best for behaviors with a clear start and end that do not happen too fast to count.
- Functional Analysis (FA): A controlled assessment that briefly arranges different conditions to test which consequence maintains a behavior. It is the most direct way to confirm function.
- Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA): A process for figuring out why a behavior happens by gathering interviews, observations, and data. The result guides a plan that targets the cause, not just the symptom.
- Functions of Behavior: The reasons a behavior keeps happening, commonly grouped as escape, attention, access to items, and automatic or sensory. Every plan should match the function.
- Generalization: When a learned skill shows up across new people, places, or materials beyond where it was taught. Skills that do not generalize have limited value.
- HIPAA (HIPAA): A federal law that sets rules for protecting personal health information. In practice it shapes how you store, send, and talk about client data.
- Incident Report: A formal record of an unusual or serious event, such as an injury or a major behavior, completed soon after it happens and shared per agency policy.
- Indirect Assessment: Gathering information about behavior through interviews, rating scales, and questionnaires rather than watching it directly. It is quick but relies on memory and report.
- Interobserver Agreement (IOA): A measure of how much two independent observers' data agree. High IOA gives confidence that the data reflect the behavior and not one person's judgment.
- Interresponse Time (IRT): The time that passes between the end of one response and the start of the next. Lengthening IRT is the goal of reinforcing slower responding.
- Intraverbal: Responding to someone else's words without copying them, as in answering a question or filling in a phrase.
- Latency: The time between a cue or instruction and the start of the behavior. Long latency to follow a direction is a common teaching target.
- Least-to-Most Prompting: Giving the learner a chance to respond with little or no help, then adding stronger prompts only if needed. It checks for independence on every trial.
- Magnitude: The force or intensity of a behavior. Magnitude often needs a defined scale or a tool because it is harder to judge than count or time.
- Maintenance: Continuing to perform a skill after teaching has ended. Planning for maintenance keeps hard-won skills from fading away.
- Mand: A request driven by what the learner wants in the moment. Mand training is often an early focus because it gives the learner a way to get needs met.
- Mandated Reporter: Someone legally required to report suspected abuse or neglect to the proper authorities. RBTs are typically mandated reporters in their setting.
- Momentary Time Sampling (MTS): Recording whether a behavior is happening at the exact moment an interval ends. It frees the observer between checks, which helps with group data.
- Most-to-Least Prompting: Starting with the strongest prompt and fading to lighter ones as the learner succeeds. It limits errors early in teaching.
- Motivating Operation (MO): An event that changes how much a consequence is wanted and how strongly related behaviors occur. It explains why the same reward works one moment and not the next.
- Multiple Stimulus Without Replacement (MSWO): Laying out several items, recording the one chosen, removing it, then re-presenting the rest. It produces a ranked list quickly.
- Natural Environment Teaching (NET): Teaching during everyday activities and play, following the learner's interest. It supports skills that should show up in real situations.
- Negative Punishment: Removing something after a behavior that makes that behavior less likely, such as taking away a privilege.
- Negative Reinforcement: Removing something after a behavior that makes that behavior more likely. Escape from a demand is a common form.
- Operational Definition: A clear, observable description of a behavior that two people could watch and agree on. It states what the behavior looks like, not why it happens.
- Paired Stimulus Preference Assessment: Presenting items two at a time and recording which one the learner selects, repeating across pairs to rank preference. Also called forced choice.
- Pairing: Associating yourself or a setting with things the learner enjoys so that you become a source of good things. Strong pairing makes teaching easier.
- Partial Interval Recording: Splitting time into short intervals and marking an interval if the behavior happened at any point in it. It tends to overestimate how much the behavior actually occurred.
- Permanent Product: A lasting result of behavior that can be measured after the fact, without watching it happen. Completed worksheets and broken items are common examples.
- Pivotal Response: A behavior that, once improved, produces gains across many other untrained behaviors, such as motivation or responding to multiple cues.
- Positive Punishment: Adding something after a behavior that makes that behavior less likely. Positive again means something was added.
- Positive Reinforcement: Adding something after a behavior that makes that behavior more likely in the future. The word positive means something was added, not that it feels nice.
- Preference Assessment: A structured way to find out what items or activities a learner likes most, so those can be tested as reinforcers.
- Premack Principle: Using a high-probability activity to reinforce a low-probability one. Often described as first the less preferred task, then the preferred one.
- Professional Boundaries: The limits that keep a working relationship professional rather than personal. Clear boundaries protect both the client and the technician.
- Prompt: Extra help added to an instruction to make a correct response more likely, such as a gesture, a model, or physical guidance.
- Prompt Dependence: When a learner waits for a prompt instead of responding to the natural cue. It is usually a sign that fading happened too slowly.
- Prompt Fading: Gradually reducing prompts so the learner responds to the natural cue alone. Fading prevents the learner from depending on help.
- Rate: Count of a behavior divided by the time observed, usually written as responses per minute or per hour. Rate lets you compare sessions of different lengths.
- Reinforcer Assessment: Testing whether a preferred item actually increases behavior when delivered as a consequence. Preference suggests a reinforcer, but only a reinforcer assessment confirms it.
- Response Cost: Removing a specific amount of a reinforcer, such as tokens, contingent on a problem behavior. It is a form of negative punishment.
- Response Generalization: When teaching one response leads to other untaught responses that serve the same purpose.
- Satiation: When repeated access to a reinforcer makes it temporarily lose its power. Rotating reinforcers helps avoid it.
- Schedule of Reinforcement: The rule that decides which responses get reinforced. Schedules shape how often and how steadily a behavior occurs.
- Scope of Competence: The range of tasks a person is trained and qualified to perform. Working inside your scope means not running procedures you have not been trained and supervised to do.
- Session Note: A written record of what happened during a service session, including activities, behavior, and progress. Notes support billing and continuity of care.
- Shaping: Reinforcing closer and closer approximations of a goal behavior until the full behavior appears. You build a new skill from what the learner can already do.
- Spontaneous Recovery: The reappearance of a behavior that had decreased through extinction, usually after a break. It is normal and usually fades again if the plan holds.
- Stimulus Control: When a behavior reliably happens in the presence of a specific cue and not otherwise. It shows the learner has connected the cue to the response.
- Stimulus Generalization: Responding the same way to stimuli that resemble the one used in teaching.
- Supervision: Ongoing oversight of an RBT's work by a qualified supervisor, including observation, feedback, and direction. It is required to keep the credential active.
- Tact: Naming or describing something the learner notices in the environment. A tact labels the world rather than asking for anything.
- Target Behavior: The specific behavior chosen for change in a program, whether the goal is to increase or decrease it.
- Task Analysis: Breaking a complex skill into smaller, teachable steps in order. The step list becomes the data sheet and the teaching sequence.
- Three-Term Contingency (ABC): The basic unit of analysis in ABA: antecedent, behavior, consequence. Mapping all three shows why a behavior keeps happening.
- Token Economy: A system where learners earn tokens for target behavior and later exchange them for preferred items or activities. Tokens bridge the gap to delayed rewards.
- Total Task Presentation: Teaching every step of the chain on each attempt, prompting wherever needed. It fits learners who already do some of the steps.
- Trend: The overall direction of data on a graph, going up, going down, or staying flat. Trend is one of the first things to read before judging a program.
- Trials to Criterion: The number of attempts a learner needs before reaching the mastery standard for a skill. It shows how efficiently a skill was acquired.
- Variable Interval (VI): Reinforcement for the first response after an unpredictable but averaging amount of time. It produces steady, moderate responding.
- Variable Ratio (VR): Reinforcement after an unpredictable number of responses that averages out to a set value. It produces steady, high-rate responding.
- Whole Interval Recording: Marking an interval only if the behavior lasted the entire interval. It tends to underestimate the behavior, so it suits behaviors you want to increase and sustain.