Taiwan ABA

By Li-Tsun Wang

During the last year, Taiwan Association for Behavior Analysis (TABA) kept on promoting behavior science to parents, special education teachers, private institutions, and so on. The activities held during this year included a VB-MAPP workshop, several lectures, and 2021 Annual TABA conference, and luckily most of them had funding by K-12 Education Administration, Ministry of Education in Taiwan. Most of the events had been held on-line because of Covid-19. And till the end of 2021, data about behavior analysts in Taiwan was obviously growing, there were a total 52 certificated analysts (including 7 BCBA-D, 27 BCBA, 18 BCaBA). In the future, after 2023, most countries out of U.S.A will neither be certificated through BACB, so this will promote TABA to held more lectures or workshops to provide behavior analyst’s continue education credits, and more professional events to fulfill audience’s need in future, and will promote ABA services more diversity, ethical, professional in Taiwan, and hope through certificate behavior analysts’ and professors’ effort, the localization behavior analysts certificate system will been established. The following were events during 2021:

TABA annual conference was on June 26, 2021, and focused on topic” Clinical Applications of ABA: Recent Research and Practice”, we invited Dr. James King, BCBA-D, who is program director, ABA Department in SEEK Inc., lectured “A Summary and Applied Utility of the Brief Reviews in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (2010 – 2020): Strategies to Contact Scholarly Literature and Overcoming Barriers. And invited Dr. Chu, Szu-Yin, BCBA-D in Department of Special Education, National Tsing Hua University, lectured “Research on the Application of ABA in Practice: A Discussion on Teacher and Parent Training” and teacher Joelle Tsai, master for Department of Special Education, National Tsing Hua University, lectured the ABA training process and suggestion for the same topic. Total 38 people including different area workers, teachers of special education, therapists, and behavior analysts attended this event.
During January to March 2021, we held VBMAPP workshop, through lecture , workshop to improve knowledge and practice, about 35 teachers and therapists joined this.
During March to May, TABA held 3 lectures for parents, 28 parents attended, with topics about how to teach social skills and toilet training to kids with special needs.
And during July to December 2021, TABA held lectures for therapists on-line, two of three provide behavior analyst continuing education credit. Include “Putting Ethics Code into Practice and Interactive Ethics Discussion” by Dr. Grace Chang (BCBA-D), “The frequent problems and better ways for transition of Special Children from Kindergarten to early elementary School Stage” by special education teacher Mr. Wang Yana. “Telehealth in Behavior Analysis: Ethical Considerations” by Dr. Grace Ho(BCBA-D), about the above events, 71 persons attended these workshops.
From September 2021, to spread more certificate behavior analysts attached references about ABA, TABA started invited senior BCBA, to introduced and recommend by short summary in Chinese about news, literatures and review literatures about ABA research or practice every month, and very thank you for SEEK Inc provided much support, through this way encouraged people more easily to select and find papers, these will keep working in future.

In 2022, TABA will hold several training sessions, like lectures or workshops, and most will be on-line, but after the epidemic is gradually stabilizing, hope to have a chance to provide training face to face. We will keep on our mission to spread knowledge of behavior analysis to professionals and parents, promote the science in Taiwan, and invite more members and professionals to join us.