Research on teaching has shown that incorporating active student responding (ASR) into classroom instruction facilitates learning and should be considered best practice. Nevertheless, few published studies have examined ASR using a within-participant design across a semester. Using a counterbalanced alternating treatment design, a direct comparison of three ASR methods (clickers, response cards, and hand-raising) and a control condition was conducted across four sections of a general psychology course. Students scored almost 5% higher on exams after utilizing an ASR approach than during control conditions. However, no statistically significant differences were found between experimental conditions. These data suggest that meaningful gains in exam performance are most likely due to the presentation of review questions rather than the use of specific ASR modalities.

Research on joint control has focused on mediational responses, in which simultaneous stimulus control from two sources leads to the emission of a single response, such as choosing a comparison stimulus in delayed matching-to-sample. Most recent studies of joint control examined the role of verbal mediators (i.e., rehearsal) in evoking accurate performance. They suggest that mediation is a necessity for accurate delayed matching-to-sample responding. We designed an experiment to establish covert rehearsal responses in young children. Before participants were taught such responses; however, we observed that they responded accurately at delays of 15 and 30 s without overt rehearsal. These findings suggest that in some cases, rehearsal is not necessary for accurate responding in such tasks.

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A growing need for individuals with behavior analytic training at the undergraduate level has led to an increase in baccalaureate programs with a strong behavior analytic focus. Although research has been conducted examining essential and assigned readings at the graduate level, no research to date has focused on identifying suggested readings that should be a focal point of undergraduate training programs. The purpose of the present study was to identify what individuals from across the behavior analytic field believe are essential readings for undergraduate students as they prepare for employment in the field or admission into graduate programs. Respondents were asked to provide answers to a variety of questions about essential readings in the field and whether these would be critical to undergraduate training. This paper presents those texts that were deemed essential, as well as areas where opinions varied.

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