This study assessed whether the function of an individual's problem behavior was related to the effectiveness of an intervention involving choice among tasks. Analogue functional analyses were conducted with 7 students with various diagnoses to determine whether problem behaviors were maintained by escape or attention. Following identification of the function of each student's problem behavior, reversal designs were used to assess the effectiveness of an intervention that allowed the students to choose their own instructional tasks. Results showed that students who displayed escape-maintained problem behavior showed substantial reductions in such behavior when they were provided with opportunities to choose among tasks. On the other hand, students who displayed attention-maintained problem behavior did not show any effects as a result of the choice intervention. These findings are discussed in terms of the effective use of behavior management programs involving choice and the reduction of problem behavior.

Choices were presented to 9 individuals with developmental disabilities using a two-choice format. Each pair of items, selected based on prior preference assessment, was presented to each participant in three conditions (actual items, pictures of the items, and spoken-name presentation) using a reversal design. The evaluation was conducted using food items, and was then repeated using nonfood items. The participants were also given a test to measure their skills on discrimination tasks ranging in difficulty from simple to conditional discriminations. The participants' abilities to make consistent choices with food and nonfood items were predicted, with 94% accuracy, by their discrimination skills. The findings suggest that presentation methods can affect the accuracy of a choice assessment, and that the systematic assessment of basic discrimination skills can be used to predict the effectiveness of different presentation methods in this population.

Fear of dental procedures deters many individuals with mental retardation from accepting dental treatment. This study was conducted to assess the effectiveness of two procedures, in vivo desensitization and video modeling, for increasing compliance with dental procedures in participants with severe or profound mental retardation. Desensitization increased compliance for all 5 participants, whereas video modeling increased compliance for only 1 of 3 participants.

This study investigated the effectiveness of response cost and differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) in reducing the disruptive behaviors of 25 children in a preschool classroom. Using an alternating treatments design, disruptive behavior was reduced when the participants earned tokens for the absence of disruptive behavior (DRO) or lost tokens for the occurrence of disruptive behavior (response cost). Initially, DRO was more successful in reducing the number of disruptive behaviors; however, over time, response cost proved to be more effective.DESCRIPTORS: differential reinforcement, disruptive behavior, preschoolers, response cost A few researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of response cost and differential reinforcement of other behavior (DRO) for managing aggressive and disruptive behavior of children in preschool settings. In the response-cost procedures, individual children start with a number of tokens and then lose tokens contingent on each instance of the problem behavior. If a specified number of tokens remain at the end of the session, a reinforcer is delivered (e.g., McGoey & DuPaul, 2000;Reynolds & Kelley, 1997). In the DRO procedure, children earn tokens for the absence of problem behavior in continuous intervals during the session and receive a reinforcer if they have a specified number of tokens at the end of the session (Conyers, Miltenberger, Romaniuk, Kopp, & Himle, 2003 mented individually with 4 children in a preschool setting. Conyers et al. showed that DRO decreased problem behavior when implemented with an entire class of preschoolers. The purpose of the present study was to compare the effectiveness of response cost and DRO implemented on a classwide basis with preschool children. METHOD Participants and SettingThe participants were 25 children in a preschool classroom. The participants included 4 girls and 21 boys, 4 to 5 years old, who exhibited a high level of disruptive behaviors. The study was conducted in a classroom (25 m by 25 m) with two to three teachers present during every session. Target Behaviors and Data CollectionWe recorded the number of children who exhibited disruptive behaviors during each observation interval using a 10-s interval-recording system (8 s observe, 2 s record). During all sessions, observation intervals were cued by a tape recorder with the vol-

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