Three Tiered Token Economy

Jon Timm, MADIDD Approved Behavior Analyst

Elite Behavior Analysis 10/26/11

Meet Andrea!

Likes:•Beadwork •Bologna sandwiches •Being “the boss” •Money!

Dislikes:•Being told what to do•Drinking water (yuck!)•Being woken up from a nap

Lives and attends the day program at the Rochelle Center in downtown Nashville

Target Behaviors

• Noncompliance• Verbal and physical aggression (includes being

bossy) • These often come together in bursts or

episodes• Once she starts, she’s hard to get back on

track

BSP and Replacement Behaviors

• By Michael • Focuses on increasing – Functional communication– Alternative adaptive sensory activities – Compliance

• Uses functional communication training to get Andrea to use socially appropriate functional words rather than exhibiting aggression

Why We Needed Something Else

• Michael’s plan worked perfectly– If I was implementing it

• The staff at the Rochelle Center weren’t effectively observing targeted or replacement behaviors– You could train them on FCT a million times and

they wouldn’t get it (which I did)• Needed something simple (in conjunction with

FCT) to start staff distributing consequences

How it works

Preference Assessment

Place Icons

Distribute Tokens• Green tokens: Immediately after Andrea

independently engages in an appropriate replacement behavior without prompting

• Immediately after Andrea engages in one of the appropriate behaviors listed above with some type of prompt (verbal, gestural)

• Immediately after Andrea engages in a problem behavior and does not respond to prompting

Deliver Reinforcers (or not)

• At the end of the day, the color of the greatest amount of tokens indicates the color of reinforcer she gets (or nothing)

• At first it was necessary to establish pairing by delivering tiny bits of respective reinforcer w/ each token delivered

• Didn’t take long…

Green Token Delivery

Yellow Token Delivery

Visual Prompting Tool

Compliance

Some Notes

• Effective? Maybe…• This token economy is a visual, tangible way

for staff to keep track of behavior• The spikes in both replacement and target

behaviors in the data may be attributed to increased data collection in general

• Before the TE I was seeing no data collection• Continues to maintain, easy to train

Questions/Comments?