When "Abstract" is really "Concrete"

Mid-October saw the deadline for submissions for the 2010 Convention for the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI, but we still pronounce it "ah-buh"). At the school where I work, bucketloads of social reinforcement is available for staff members who prepare and present papers at ABAI each year. There is a frenzy just before and after the actual Convention to think about papers that would be good for next year's convention, but the real work generally gets done about half a year later: at submission time for the following year's convention.

Applications require submission of the abstract to the paper to be presented. Sometimes this is easy: the study has been done, the paper is written, just send the abstract as it already exists.

Other times, the study is just a great idea, and the convention becomes to goal line for completing the study. When this is the case, a loosely assembled set of fairly abstract ideas for a study have to be abstracted into an abstract in short order. It's time to get down to business and pull together the essential ideas of background literature, purpose, design, and expected results. The document that comes from this process, the abstract, tends to be pretty concrete in the end.

Here's a sample abstract for a study we're just putting together now:

<>AMANDA W. DOLL, Ed.M, BCBA, Tina Covington, PhD, BCBA, Rachel Sgueglia, MS.Ed., and Dana Logozio, MS.Ed.<>Previous research (Doll, Covington, Rosenfeld, & Cerrone, 2009) has identified that a subset of teaching staff do not respond to repeated observation-and-feedback cycles with a modified TPRA form fashioned after Ingham & Greer, 1992. In the 2009 study, those teachers who continued to commit instructional errors subsequently improved when they were taught how to use the modified TPRA form and then used this form in order to self-score their own teaching behavior from video samples. Teaching accuracy improved and instructional rate also improved; accuracy was a treated variable, while rate was an untreated variable. The present study seeks to replicate results from the 2009 study; to identify teachers for whom observation-and-feedback cycles are not serving to improve instructional behavior; to create a data-base for using video self-observation as a tactic when instructional practices need to be improved. Data collection is ongong.