This document describes a three-tiered token economy system implemented for a client named Andrea to address behaviors of noncompliance, verbal and physical aggression. The system uses green, yellow and red tokens to track and reward appropriate replacement behaviors and reduce problematic behaviors. Tokens correspond to reinforcers from a preference assessment. Charts show increases in appropriate behaviors and decreases in aggression following implementation, suggesting the visual token system provided an effective way for staff to consistently deliver consequences.

1. Three Tiered Token
Economy
Jon Timm, MA
DIDD Approved Behavior Analyst
Elite Behavior Analysis
10/26/11

2. Meet Andrea!
Likes: Dislikes:
•Beadwork •Being told what to do
•Bologna sandwiches •Drinking water (yuck!)
•Being “the boss” •Being woken up from a nap
•Money!
Lives and attends the day program at the Rochelle Center in downtown Nashville

3. Target Behaviors
• Noncompliance
• Verbal and physical aggression (includes being
bossy)
• These often come together in bursts or
episodes
• Once she starts, she’s hard to get back on
track

4. BSP and Replacement Behaviors
• By Michael
• Focuses on increasing
– Functional communication
– Alternative adaptive sensory activities
– Compliance
• Uses functional communication training to get
Andrea to use socially appropriate functional
words rather than exhibiting aggression

5. Why We Needed Something Else
• Michael’s plan worked perfectly
– If I was implementing it
• The staff at the Rochelle Center weren’t
effectively observing targeted or replacement
behaviors
– You could train them on FCT a million times and
they wouldn’t get it (which I did)
• Needed something simple (in conjunction
with FCT) to start staff distributing
consequences

7. How it works

8. Preference Assessment

9. Place Icons

10. Distribute Tokens
• Green tokens: Immediately after Andrea
independently engages in an appropriate
replacement behavior without prompting
• Immediately after Andrea engages in one of the
appropriate behaviors listed above with some type
of prompt (verbal, gestural)
• Immediately after Andrea engages in a problem
behavior and does not respond to prompting

11. Deliver Reinforcers (or not)
• At the end of the day, the color of the greatest
amount of tokens indicates the color of
reinforcer she gets (or nothing)
• At first it was necessary to establish pairing by
delivering tiny bits of respective reinforcerw/
each token delivered
• Didn’t take long…

15. Yellow Token Delivery

19. Compliance

21. Some Notes
• Effective? Maybe…
• This token economy is a visual, tangible way
for staff to keep track of behavior
• The spikes in both replacement and target
behaviors in the data may be attributed to
increased data collection in general
• Before the TE I was seeing no data collection
• Continues to maintain, easy to train

22. Questions/Comments?