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G.15: Design and evaluate procedures to promote stimulus and response generalization.

Free practice questions for this part of the BCBA, with an explanation for every option.

A child learned to label "cup" using only one red plastic cup in the clinic and does not label other cups at home. Which procedure best promotes stimulus generalization?
  1. A. Using a more intrusive prompt hierarchy with the same cup
    Prompt intrusiveness does not address the narrow range of training stimuli.
  2. B. Running more trials with the same red cup until fluency
    More practice with a single exemplar can tighten stimulus control to that specific cup.
  3. C. Teaching with multiple exemplars that vary in color, size, and material
    Correct. Teaching sufficient exemplars that sample the range of relevant variation promotes generalization to untrained cups.
  4. D. Moving to a continuous reinforcement schedule
    The reinforcement schedule does not widen the stimulus class.
After being taught to greet peers by saying "Hi," a student starts greeting peers with "Hey there" and a wave, which were never trained. This outcome is best described as:
  1. A. Stimulus generalization
    Stimulus generalization is the trained response occurring in the presence of untrained stimuli.
  2. B. Response maintenance
    Maintenance is the continued performance of the trained response after intervention ends.
  3. C. Recombinative generalization from matrix training
    Recombinative generalization involves new combinations of trained components within a matrix. That is not described here.
  4. D. Response generalization
    Correct. Untrained responses that are functionally equivalent to the trained response are response generalization.
A BCBA is teaching an adult with an intellectual disability to buy a drink from vending machines in his community. The machines differ in where the coin slot is, how the buttons are laid out, and where the drink comes out. Which teaching approach is most likely to produce correct use of machines he has never been taught on?
  1. A. Teach with one machine until he is 100% accurate for five days in a row
    Mastery on one machine often leads to narrow stimulus control. Features of other machines may not occasion correct responding.
  2. B. Teach with the machine he uses most and prompt on other machines as needed
    This waits for failures and then reteaches machine by machine. It is 'train and hope' followed by reactive retraining, not a planned strategy for producing generalization to untrained machines.
  3. C. Teach with a classroom simulation built to look like one common machine
    A simulation of one machine has the same limitation as training on a single example and adds the differences between simulated and real settings.
  4. D. Teach with several machines chosen to sample the full range of variation
    Correct. General case analysis selects teaching examples that represent the full range of stimulus and response variation in the natural setting. This makes correct performance with untrained machines most likely.

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