The current study attempts to expand the empirical consultation research base by examining the effects of direct and indirect consultee training methods on treatment integrity and treatment outcomes. A multiple baseline design across consultation dyads was used to investigate the influence of these variables. The results suggest that direct consultee training led to higher treatment integrity. In addition, results for three of four consultation cases support the hypothesis that treatments implemented with high integrity led to successful outcomes.

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Assessment data are used to make treatment recommendations for students with mild disabilities. However, no assessment procedures exist that allow one to predict with certainty that one academic intervention will be more effective than another academic intervention for a particular student with mild disabilities. Therefore, hypotheses regarding intervention effectiveness should be tested by assessing students' learning rates under different instructional procedures. In this demonstration, alternating treatment designs are used to show how more precise measurement of instructional time can impact the assessment of relative learning rates when students are exposed to more than one intervention. Discussion centers around the importance of time as a contextual variable when assessing the effects of academic interventions.

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the assessment of treatment integrity. Current studies have examined means by which to increase treatment integrity but may be limited by an overreliance on indirect measures of treatment integrity and failure to address multiple training methods within one study. The present study was conducted to investigate the relationship between training procedures and treatment integrity. Participants first read a case description and intervention plan for a client (confederate) exhibiting a facial tic. Participants were trained using one of three procedures (didactic, modeling, or rehearsal/feedback) to implement the treatment protocol and then conducted a treatment session with the client. Treatment sessions were coded for accuracy of implementation (integrity). Higher levels of treatment integrity were associated with direct training procedures (i.e., modeling and rehearsal/feedback training). Implications of the results for treatment planning and the potential ramifications for consultants working in the schools are discussed.

This study sought to extend functional methodology to the assessment and treatment of habits. After a descriptive assessment indicated that coughing occurred while eating, a brief functional analysis suggested that social attention was the maintaining variable. Results demonstrated that treatment, derived from the assessment and analysis data, rapidly eliminated the cough. We discuss the appropriateness of using functional analysis procedures for deriving treatments for habits in a clinical setting.