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Follow-Up
Commentary on Training Behavior Analysts
Richard W. Malott
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In Response to Reid
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In Response to Johnston
In
Response to Baer (1992)
In Defense of the
Status Quo?
Baer essentially supports the status quo. He argues, “If very
many of the students whom we intend to train as researchers behave
immediately after graduation as practitioners, then apparently we are training very many practitioners, whatever topography
we may claim for that training” (p. 89). That reminds me of
what physicians in Montevideo tell me about the practice of medicine
there: The medical school trains more MDs than there are desirable
positions to fill. Therefore, many MDs become taxi drivers. Does Baer’s
logic suggest the more appropriate name for the overly productive
medical school should be the Uruguay National Medical School and Taxi
Driver Institute? That trained researchers become practitioners does
not mean that they were trained to become practitioners. They became
practitioners in spite of their training.
However, if the status quo were Don Baer, I would certainly
join its defense. I know of no one who matches his rate of graduating
high-quality researchers. In his case, I consider the effective practitioner/administrators
he graduates as an added benefit, not as a justification for others
adopting his practices.
Inculcating Proresearcher,
Antipractitioner Values
Baer is right; I do not have much formal data. And he may not often
tell his students they should become researchers. And he may be among
the rare professors who do not find it especially reinforcing to clone
themselves. Or he may define the clone more generally than most –
perhaps successful clones are alumni who are properly data based in
whatever endeavor they take on. But, despite what we professors say,
we do train our graduate students in environments in which so much
emphasis is placed on research that the winning professors are defined
as those with the most or best publications and the losers, including
those who do not get tenure, are those with the fewest or worst publications.
It is hard to imagine our graduate students successfully modeling
their professors without acquiring those values to some extent. In
other words, I take it as unexceptional that I heard a Kansas alumnus
complain that the developmental disabilities center where he worked
as a practitioner/administrator did not support research.
Students and Teacher:
Conflicting Interest?
Baer believes that “Training programs are not nearly as effective
in altering student behavior as students are in taking from what they
want” (p. 90). He almost seems to offer this as defense for
teaching whatever that professor finds reinforcing or expedient to
teach. What the professor tries to teach does not matter because hidden
within the professor’s course will be ample training for the
student to do whatever the student ends up doing. Furthermore, the
cunning and resourceful student will be able to extract that useful
training from the mass of irrelevancies the course contains. Does
this seem optimistic?
In Defense of Pseudoscience?
Baer seems to suggest that a quiet increase in the frequency of worthless
correlation studies is evidence that many people know research training
is irrelevant for practitioners, so they do easy pseudoscience dissertations.
Why not do worthwhile behavioral systems analysis and interventions
of the sort students need practice doing for their later careers?
Of course such work might not help the advisors get tenure, a serious
concern I do not demean.
I did not hope my recommendations would be “revolutionary”
within any “communities of verbal behavior about graduate training”
(p. 91). But I did hope my recommendation for a functional, job-based,
goal-driven curriculum would be discriminated from a recommendation
for more useless “Functionally . . . commonplace” (p.
91) pseudoscientific research.
Can We Reliably
Train Strategies?
I do not argue against the value of training our students to tell
if something is “true or false” (p. 91). And I do not
argue with Baer’s observation that this “does not happen
in many research-training programs” (p. 91). Also, I do not
argue with Baer suggestion that “if we understand a lot about
the conditions under which we will say that something is true or false,
we will reliably invent the necessary technique whenever we need it,
if we do not already know it.” (p. 91). But one of the most
outstanding researchers in behavior analysis lamented that many students
from his graduate course in truth and falsehood showed no evidence
of ever having read Johnston and Pennypacker or Sidman at dissertation
time. Perhaps he failed to teach “the logic of experimental
control” (p. 91). However, my 25 years experience in teaching
graduate student has been that is it is depressingly hard for students
to acquire general abstract strategies they can transfer across disparate
problems. I have not quit; I still try. But my experience and the
training literature suggest that the more specific and concrete the
training, the more likely it will alter the student’s repertoire
in usable ways. Along the same lines, I see little evidence that most
scholars, including behavior analysts, are much better judges of truth
and falsity outside their own specialty areas than are taxi drivers,
especially if the scholars have a vested interest.
Can We Justify the
Status Quo?
Baer seems to suggest that no matter who we train and mo matter what
the market needs, everything will adjust appropriately. That seems
a Panglossian justification for the status quo. Also, the absence
of experimental data does not seem to be an adequate justification
for our current expensive, restrictive status quo.
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Read
In Response to Reid
Read
In Response to Johnston
