Quick, what's 47 minus 12? What did you have for breakfast the day before yesterday? When is the next leap year? Hit pause real quick and try to answer these.

Don't worry, I'm not going to hold you to your answers. What's more important is the processes you went through derive them. If you find this sort of thing interesting, then this is the podcast for you!

Dr. Judah Axe joins me in Session 282 to discuss a behavioral interpretation of problem solving. Judah is a Professor in the Department of Behavior Analysis at Simmons University, and along with Drs. Paul Alberto and Anne Troutman, he is the author of Applied Behavior Analysis for Teachers. Here are just some of the topics we hit on:

• What, in behavioral terms, constitutes a problem?
• How Skinner first conceptualized problems and problem solving.
• How self-talk, visualization, and other private events play a role in problem solving.
• How we both wished we had stronger backgrounds in Developmental Psychology. 
• A quick review of Blooms Taxonomy.
• Current educational practices that potentially impede the development of higher order problem solving.
• Some topics that Judah may discuss at the upcoming Verbal Behavior Conference.
• How to determine if or when to teach problem solving skills.
• How improvisation might be fostered.
• The role of developing rules.
• The challenges of studying problem solving.

Here are some resources we discussed:

• The Verbal Behavior Conference.
• Marckel, Neef, and Ferreri (2013). A PRELIMINARY ANALYSIS OF TEACHING IMPROVISATION WITH THE PICTURE EXCHANGE COMMUNICATION SYSTEM TO CHILDREN WITH AUTISM.
• Park and Gaylord-Ross (1989). A problem-solving approach to social skills training in employment settings with mentally retarded youth.
• Mann and Karsten (2020). Efficacy and social validity of procedures for improving conversational skills of college students with autism.
• Axe, Phelan, and Irwin (2019). Empirical Evaluations of Skinner’s Analysis of Problem Solving.
• Talk Aloud Problem Solving.
• A sampling of LeBlanc and Carr's work in the area of problem solving.
• Michael (2017). What Every Student of Behavior Analysis Ought to Learn: A System for Classifying the Multiple Effects of Behavioral Variables.
• Spiral bound atlases.

This podcast is brought to you by:

• ACE Approved CEUs from .... Behavioral Observations. That's right, get your CEUs while driving (maybe even this episode!), walking your dog, doing the dishes, or whatever else you might have going on, all while learning from your favorite podcast guests!
• The Behavioral Toolbox. thebehavioraltoolbox.com is a new education and training site that my colleagues Anika Costa and Dr. Paulie Gavoni and I have been working on for over two years. Check out our latest course, Motivational Interviewing: Getting Educator Buy-In as well as the hugely popular When Not to FBA: 5 Quick Strategies for Improving Behavior in Classrooms.
• Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations. Don't forget to use the coupon code, PODCAST to save at checkout!
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Dr. Matt Tincani joins Dr. John Borrero and me for the 21st (can you believe it!?!?) installment of the Inside JABA Series on Behavioral Observations.

From a research perspective, this Inside JABA episode is by far our most wonkiest one to date. By that I mean we take a deep dive into the area of Open Science Practices.

If you're not familiar with the Open Science movement, Matt walks us through the basics. In doing so, we review the lead paper in the fall 2024 issue of JABA that he co-wrote with Drs. Shawn Gilroy and Art Dowdy (see Tincani, Gilroy, and Dowdy, 2024).

Of the several Open Science Practices, this paper - and by extension, this episode - focuses on Preregistration. According to Tincani and colleagues, "preregistration entails outlining a research protocol and specifying the study methods and plans for analysis, which are then archived publicly in a repository before conducting the study" (see p. 4).

The point of doing this, amongst others, is to increase transparency and reduce criticisms of questionable research practices in Behavior-Analytic research, such as the file drawer effect, dropping participants from analyses, and so on.

While these aims sound laudable, when reading this paper, my inner skeptic began formulating a handful of objections to preregistration, such as increasing barriers to conducting research by adding additional steps, "boxing in" the work of researchers to the point if inflexibility, and so on. Both in the paper and on this podcast, Matt walks through these common objections, so if you too are skeptical, give this episode a listen and see if Matt's treatment of these resonate with you.

Here are a few resources mentioned in the episode:

• Tincani, Gilroy, and Dowdy (2024). Extensions of open science for applied behavior analysis: Preregistration for single-case experimental designs.

• Tincani and Travers (2019). Replication Research, Publication Bias, and Applied Behavior Analysis.

• Subscribe to JABA here.

• Open Science Collaboration (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science.

• Retraction Watch.

• Rick Kubina, Session 39.

• Kubina et al. (2017). A Critical Review of Line Graphs in Behavior Analytic Journals.