Kelsey Ruppel

Senior Consultant, FTF Behavioral Consulting

Dr. Ruppel's work focuses on the practical functional assessment and skill-based treatment of problem behaviour, as well as preventing the development of severe problem behaviour in young children with autism. She began her career as a teaching assistant in a specialized school for students with developmental disabilities and eventually served as a school-based special education teacher, BCBA, and curriculum supervisor. She has also implemented and supervised in-home ABA programming, taught courses as a faculty fellow at Western New England University, served as the Associate Director of Dr. Hanley’s Life Skills Clinic at Western New England University, and served as a BCBA at an inpatient hospital program for children with severe problem behaviour. Kelsey is currently a Senior Consultant at FTF Behavioral Consulting, and she has served as a consultant to a range of organizations, including schools, in-home and outpatient clinic providers, and residential programs. She holds a Master’s degree in Special Education from Johns Hopkins University and a doctoral degree in Behavior Analysis from Western New England University under the supervision of Dr. Hanley.

SESSION

Skill-Based Treatment for Automatically Reinforced Behavior

October 22, 2021 - 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM

The Practical Functional Assessment and Skill-Based Treatment processes (Hanley et al., 2014) were designed to address problem behaviour sensitive to social reinforcement, such as escape from adult-led tasks to child-led play with specific forms of adult attention. However, recent research has focused on extending the Skill-Based Treatment to some topographies of behaviour sensitive to automatic reinforcement. This presentation will discuss such applications, including the use of Skill-Based Treatment to teach learners with autism to refrain from stereotypy when it interferes with important learning opportunities and to allocate stereotypy to times and places in which it is not interfering. This presentation will also discuss the use of Skill-Based Treatment to address mouthing of non-food items. Future directions in this line of research will be noted.

This session is sponsored by the Social Skills Training Institute and their ground-breaking program, Secret Agent Society (SAS). SAS is a globally recognized award-winning evidence-based program that can be tailored to individuals, small groups or whole classrooms. Learn how you can use SAS in your practice at sst-institute.net.