Animal Behavior Research Readers - Overview

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Ever feel lonely reading a research article? Do you crave colleagues to discuss, ask questions, and check your understanding of the study?

Animal Behavior Research Readers is a new guided reading group hosted by Behavior Works for animal professionals and behavior analysts who want to enhance their understanding of the application of the science of behavior change, with a focus on animal behavior.

Members will read research and other seminal articles related to hot topics in animal learning and attend monthly meetings to discuss each article with a community of professionals. Build your research review skills by receiving expert guidance and critical analysis from group facilitator Dr. Christy Alligood.

You are eligible for membership if you have taken any research methods course, including an undergraduate or graduate level college course, or Behavior Works’ How Research Works course.

Register a 3-month, membership for $120. Meetings are held once per month. Each three-month session will have a theme, with a focus on crossing species and scientific disciplines to broaden our learning.

Eligible for 3.5 BACB Learning CEUs per meeting.

2025 Sessions:
All meetings are at 2:00-4:00PM Pacific Time

Session 1:
Thursdays
January 30, February 27, March 27
Theme: Research Readers Greatest Hits (Choice and control, Preference vs. reinforcement, Noncontingent reinforcement)

Session 2:
Tuesdays
April 22, May 20, June 17
Theme: Providing Choices in Training: Honor the no and shape the yes.

Session 3:
Tuesdays
July 29, August 26, September 23
Theme: All About Reinforcement I (Transitions between schedules of positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, asynchronous and conjugate schedules of reinforcement)

Session 4:
Tuesdays
October 21, November 18, December 16
Theme: All About Reinforcement II (Delay to reinforcement, conditioned reinforcers as discriminative stimuli, jackpots)

For questions about eligibility or to register, please contact Dr. Christy Alligood.

What people are saying...

• These have been really enjoyable and rewarding experiences for me. Dr. Alligood provides a well directed and organized framework while encouraging fluid participation by all Research Readers.
• Dr. Alligood's ability to encourage the engagement all participants of quite widely varied experience is remarkable, yet she always returns to the core goal of our group which is to gain better understanding and implementation of skills useful in the evaluation of behavioral analysis scientific research publications.
• I appreciate Dr. Alligood’s consistently positive comments in response to group members who speak. You seamlessly weave in research specific language with those responses to help us continue to become more familiar with it.
• Dr. Alligood’s deep knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject make this group a valuable component to continue learning about our animals!
• This is an extremely valuable study group, teaching us both very concrete fundamentals of scientific writing while concurrently expanding our knowledge of the field of behavior analysis by systematically reviewing relevant papers within the field of interest.
• The remedial and amplifying information Dr. Alligood adds to the topics and the research paper format/conventions is especially helpful. (I start the reading assignment full of uncertainty and leave the group session with a much fuller understanding of the paper than I imagined.)
• There is a wide variety of perspectives within the group. Dr. Allgood does a great job of encouraging participants to express their views then guiding responses to create a cohesive discussion.