Co-sponsored by the Federation and the Association for Behavior Analysis

On  April 10, 2003, the Federation co-sponsored a Forum on Research Management (FORM) with one of its member societies, the Association for Behavior Analysis  (ABA) (www.abainternational.org).   The topic, "Translating Basic Research Into Application" is a particularly  timely one, especially as the facilitation of basic research to application is  an important funding initiative at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  

The  FORM was divided into three related but distinct subtopics, with Federation  President Howard Egeth (Johns Hopkins University) serving as moderator.   

Panel One                                     

The first panel covered advances in the field of Behavior Analysis that have  successfully made the transition from basic research into application.  (Note  that all of the academics on this panel are and have been funded by NIH but not  explicitly vis-à-vis the NIH initiative.)  Behavior Analysis is a discipline in  Psychology founded on the principle of conducting basic research on animals and  humans and then using those principles to inform clinical models (e.g. behavior  therapy).  The focus on the individual (and attendant environmental factors)  makes it amenable to addressing translational issues.  For example, Mike Perone  (West Virginia University) discussed the basic research question of  understanding when a subject pauses after reinforcement (and for how long) and  demonstrated that long pauses occur primarily in shifts from rich to leaner  reinforcement conditions.  Perone noted that this preparation could be an  effective model for testing aberrant behavior and investigating ways to reduce  it.  He stated that behavior analytic experimental designs could address the  reciprocity of basic and applied issues.  Bob Heinssen (National Institute of  Mental Health, NIH) further suggested that Perone's basic finding may help to  explain why a person relapses after leaving a highly-reinforcing therapy  situation and returns to his or her normal environment. 

In a  somewhat related vein, Edmund Fantino (University of California- San Diego)            discussed research he has conducted with both pigeons and humans on assessing  probabilities, demonstrating that pigeons were more adept at making "decisions"  of this sort than were humans.  Since people commit the "base-rate neglect"  error (as shown in Kahnemann & Tversky's work), these subjects carry a bias not  observed in non-verbal organisms such as the pigeon.  Fantino noted that this  tendency to ignore base rates, even when trained to avoid this type of error,  has serious implications for health care workers interpreting test results.   Heinssen noted another application of this basic research could be in addressing  perseveration in physicians.  That is, they may follow a manual without  attention to such mitigating factors, get personally invested in the method and  not consider other sorts of data.

Kate  Saunders (University of Kansas) discussed her data on mentally-challenged adults  and how the basic research findings could be applied towards teaching the  mentally-challenged and other disadvantaged populations how to read.  For  example, she noted how computer applications properly designed to teach reading  could both accelerate the learning process and reduce the potential embarrassment associated with learning  how to read as an adult.  Unfortunately, since society has low expectations  for the mentally-challenged, she said that techniques have not been fully  developed for them but instead have focused on teaching normal children to read.   Since the mentally challenged suffer serious deficits in learning ability, there  is a challenge to researchers to fine-tune the analysis of what actually goes  into learning to read.  Saunders explained that there are visual as well as  phonological components in learning how to read and while these components are  assumed to be quite accessible in normal populations, these are basic areas  needing research for the mentally challenged.  

Overall, this session was a presentation of data gathered from basic research  with some clear applications and also helped to generate ideas on possible new  applications to extract from the basic data.  There was some discussion that  basic researchers may not want to wait for others to see and develop possible  applications of their work but should instead think about the links to  application that they personally see in their own work.  

Panel Two

The  second panel focused on bridging the gap between research and practice in  education.  According to Suzanne Donovan (Associate Director of the  National Research Council's Strategic Education Research Partnership, SERP),good research in areas such as cognitive and developmental psychology is not  carried far enough to improve practice in education.  Even the best  research is not cumulative (replicated and built upon), refined (for whom does  it work and under what circumstances) or made easily accessible.  Once  research is put into practice, it isn't applied or studied  systematically, with wide variation in classroom teaching and district/states  policy. The NRC's committee has concluded that a new research and development  infrastructure is needed that will 1) Develop a coherent program of research and  development, and 2) Focus research on problems of practice.  The SERP  committee has proposed the development of a coherent program of research and  development, linking knowledge with product development and and linking student  and teacher learning, organizational issues, and policy issues. 

James McPartland (Center for Social Organization of Schools, Johns Hopkins  University) addressed the transformation of high-poverty, low-performing schools  though research-based organizational and instructional reforms.   High-poverty high schools are fraught with learning environment and student  outcome problems (e.g., low expectations of students, weak staff morale, low  test scores, and high drop-out rates).  Research has indicated that smaller  schools facilitate the creation of a more hospitable school environment  (personalized adult/student relationships, higher morale, improved attendance  and motivation).  Dr. McPartland has worked with school systems on the  creation of small, personalized, "academies" within schools.  These  academies emphasize the fostering of personal relationships, with individualized  attention for students with specific problems, and on literacy, with extra time  and classroom activities devoted to fluency and comprehension.  The academy  approach seems to be paying off in low-performance schools, with the next step  being the creation of more research and development centers and teams with  researchers and practitioners working together.

Panel Three

Bill  Leslie (Johns Hopkins University) presented a historical perspective on the  relationship between basic technological research and application,  Dr.  Leslie showed a series of slides of old labs, factories, workers, and equipment.   In the early 1900s, it was believed that basic research should be isolated in  all ways from the application of the research findings.  Quite a bit of  research was performed by what we would now call "blue-collar workers", but  after World War II, there was a trend for lab-workers to abandon their blue-  collar attire and don white lab coats.  Labs no longer resembled machine  shops, but were instead new, clean, and sterile.  These new research  centers embodied a linear model...that is, research findings would be translated  directly into application and technology, without any type of feedback loop  relaying suggestions back to the researchers.  As you may imagine, the  linear model was not successful!  In order for our research and our  research applications and practice to reach their potential, we need to create  mechanisms by which researchers, practitioners, and policy makers can interact  and learn from one another's experience. 

Agenda: Click here to view the agenda for this event.

Speaker Bios: Click here to view speaker bios for this event.

Power Points: Power Point presentations for this event have been archived and are available  upon request.