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Evaluating Recommendations Versus Utilization Of Essential Components Of A Functional Analysis Procedure, Alissa Conway

Dissertations

Functional behavior assessment (FBA) has been identified as an essential process for behavior analytic practitioners to identify the variables maintaining challenging behaviors (BACB Professional and Ethical Compliance Code for Behavior Analysts (PECC), 3.01ab, 2014). FBAs include a range of strategies, including indirect measures (e.g., interviews and questionnaires) and direct measures of behavior (descriptive and experimental strategies). Functional analysis (FA) is typically considered the most sophisticated of the options subsumed under FBAs in that it involves both direct measures of behavior and experimental manipulation of hypothesized controlling variables to identify controlling variables for challenging behaviors. The results of FAs allow practitioners …

Assessment For Mild Cognitive Impairment: Striving For Best Practice, Julie Leigh Dalmasso

Dissertations

This dissertation is a series of three studies aimed at determining the best assessment practices for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) that can employed by speech-language pathologists (SLPs). The first study was non-experimental and descriptive examining whether three commonly used assessment instruments yielded similar categorical results. The data were analyzed to determine whether the Eight-Item Interview to Differentiate Aging and Dementia (AD8), the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), and the Cognitive-Linguistic Quick Test (CLQT) identified the same participants from a neurotypical sample as having cognitive deficits. Very little agreement was found amongst the three tools.

Study two was modified to include two …