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- When a social or environmental event immediately precedes the occurrence of problem behavior, it is referred to as an antecedent event.
- Antecedent events are often aspects of an environment, including time of day, the physical setting, the presence of certain individuals, or specific types of activities.
- Physiological events that immediately precede problem behavior may also be considered antecedent events.
- The introduction of antecedent events that control positive behavior in a student's environment is a strategy that is intended to compete with and replace problem behavior.
- When a behavior is more likely to occur in the presence of a discriminative stimulus, but not in its absence, the behavior is described as being under stimulus control.
- A functional assessment will provide details about antecedent events associated with both the occurrence and nonoccurrence of problem behavior and the relationship with reinforcers within the environment.
- Many of antecedent intervention strategies include modifying the activities that students are engaged in or altering the manner in which the activities are presented.
- Some curricular interventions involve modifying the content of the task or the method for completing the task.
- Choosing activities that produce immediate reinforcement can lead to an increase in academic responding, and a reduction in problem behavior.
- Difficult tasks often include higher numbers of student errors, more corrective feedback, and lower rates of positive reinforcement leading to a higher likelihood of problem behavior.
- One strategy, called errorless learning, involves altering the stimuli within an activity to prompt correct responding.
- Student errors can be reduced by manipulating the stimuli within a task, then gradually fading the extra support until the student is successfully completing the original activity.
- Other interventions involve modifying the way in which an academic task is accomplished in order to decrease task difficulty.
- Some antecedent intervention strategies modify how the instructional content is presented.
- Opportunities to make choices between tasks can reduce avoidance-motivated problem behaviors and may be an important variable influencing task performance.
- Presenting a variety of activities, instead of one task of longer duration, has been shown to decrease problem behavior and increase engagement.
- Asking the student to engage in a series of high-probability requests creates more opportunities to provide positive feedback and increases the likelihood that the student will comply with the less preferred request.
- Including clear visual cues indicating how much work is expected and modifying the length of a difficult task are antecedent interventions.
- Maintaining a fairly brief interval between student responses and the next teacher request has been associated with a decrease in problem behavior and an increase in correct responding.
- Many students with disabilities show improved engagement in academic tasks and are less likely to engage in problem behavior when they can predict upcoming events.
- Designing a proactive environment which addresses antecedent variables can be implemented at a classroom level as well.
- Intervention strategies including curricular modification or changing how a task is presented should be implemented in conjunction with a student's academic goals and objectives.
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