Applied Psychology Info Session (Webinar)
Watch our webinar recording for details about how Rider’s M.A. in Applied Psychology will provide you with the tools to solve performance problems, build new behaviors and strengthen existing behaviors in children with autism.
Transcript
Frances A. Perrin-English, Program Coordinator: (Thank you) for joining us. We are here to talk about the Applied Psychology program at Rider. This master's program was really designed to create an opportunity for students to become prepared to be board-certified behavior analysts. Our program, while it doesn't give you all the requirements you need to sit for the exam, our coursework has been verified by the Association for Behavior Analysis International and so it gives you two of the three pieces that you need you to sit for that exam.
You need the master's degree and you need the specific coursework and we're able to give you both of that. And we can also support individuals in finding placements to get the supervised experience, if they need that, if they're not already in a situation where they're able to have supervisors that are board-certified, provide that supervision.
Our goal as a program is to teach students not just how to work with individuals with autism, though that obviously is a main highlight. But we really strive to teach individuals that behavior analysis can be used across a wide range of not only behavior but also populations so that it's not limited to individuals with disabilities. So we provide that core curriculum that meets the requirements for the content for the exam but we're also lucky enough to be able to bring you electives in areas completely outside of autism and developmental disabilities.
Our verified course sequence consists of eight courses and so that's sort of what we call the core, and then students are required to take an additional four electives. And we have like I said electives not just in things like interventions for autism or current research and behavior analysis, but also focus on addictions.
So we have one of our faculty members is a behavior analyst whose research specialty is actually gambling and other addictions. But we also have an organizational behavior management course that focuses on using behavior analysis for individuals in the workplace, so that's great because even if you are working in developmental disabilities or in school, at some point as a behavior analyst you may be managing staff under you. And so that's really all about focusing on how to change their behavior for the better.
We also have a course behavior and analytic approaches to health and physical activity. That course looks at sort of self-management behaviors, changing your own healthy behaviors, also looks at the research in those areas for both typically developing and not typically developing individuals. So that's like you know a really fun elective too.
We do offer an optional thesis. The thesis spans actually three semesters so if you do it if you choose to do the thesis option you actually take 37 credits instead of 36, so the first semester is a one credit sort of proposal time where you're sitting working on you know the idea and a lit review for your thesis topic. If you're interested in research but don't want to do that you know full three semester experience, you can do a one semester independent study. And we've had a lot of students who have chosen that route, have identified some behavior deficit or behavior excess with a client that they're already working with, and then developed an intervention around that and written that up sort of from a research perspective. So there's lots of different options there if you're interested in sort of doing a little bit more.
Trying to think what else I want to add. So we have myself and two other full-time faculty who are behavior analysts and we all have experience working in the field. And then all of our other courses are taught by adjuncts so we're actually bringing in people who are working day to day in the field. We feel that that really benefits students, it gives them an opportunity to learn from somebody who's doing this on a daily basis and you know gives them expertise you know from people who you know have a lot of experience, and that's really important.
We have set up the program so that you can do this while working, we expect that our students are all trying to get their you know 2,000 hours of field experience while they're doing the work in the classroom as well. So typically the students are taking two classes a semester. If you start in the fall you would do two classes in the fall, two in the spring, two across our summer sessions and then the same thing the following year so it takes two calendar years if you do it that way.
You can speed it up a little bit if you want to, occasionally we have students who might take three classes in a fall or spring semester. That's really tough there's you know, you're there three nights a week in that situation but it's doable if you want to do that. And then we have students who take it much slower and they take one class per semester. So we can really sort of tailor that experience to you.
All of the core courses are offered twice a year, electives are offered at least once a year, some of them are offered twice. And so we can sort of individualize the plan for each student, sort of mapped out you know if there's a specific elective you want to take we can let you know when that's offered and and you can plan ahead for that.
All of our courses start at either 5:30/6:00. I think we have one adjunct who still starts at 6:30 but for the most part they're 5:30 or 6:00 o'clock starts. They run for 3 hours, you're here once a week for class, except in the summer because we run 7, sorry, 6 and a half sessions, so you're here like a Monday/Wednesday or a Tuesday/Thursday for one class that way.
So I think that's sort of my overview at this point, I can open it up to questions. Feel free to ask very specific things because you know if it applies to one of you it may apply to the other.