Less Searching, More Applying: A Practitioner's Guide to Contacting Literature
CONTACT US about group and customized options for organizations.
Abstract
Behavior analysis is a science, making science literacy is a critical skill for all who practice. Many behavior analysts with experience in the field have probably noticed that there is a lot of inaccurate, debunked, or outdated information available that can get in the way of our clinical work. The scientist-practitioner skills that are taught in this course are designed to help clinicians separate the data “wheat” from the pseudoscience “chaff.”
This course explains the scientist-practitioner model and how it applies to behavior analysis. It then details specific steps for interacting with scientific literature, followed by examples of how these steps can be applied to real-world case examples. It is our hope that this course will turn searching the literature from an avoidance behavior into a behavior that results in positive reinforcement, because behavior analyst practitioners who have solid skills for contacting, digesting, understanding, and critiquing the literature can avoid misinformation and access better client outcomes.
Learning Checklist
- Identify characteristics of the scientist-practitioner model
- Apply the steps for conducting a literature review
- Identify examples of good research questions
- Explain how to evaluate common parts of a research article
- Evaluate the utility of research articles to applied scenarios
