BCBA Concepts and Principles Practice Questions
Domain B of the BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.) · 24 of the 175 scored questions (14%)
185 questions across all nine domains in 4 hours, with a score for concepts and principles so you know where you stand.
Free concepts and principles drillIn Ms. Ortiz's class, Kofi's calling out produces teacher attention about four times every 10 minutes, while his hand raising produces attention about once every 10 minutes. Based on the matching law, which change would most likely shift Kofi's responding toward hand raising?
Concepts and Principles on the BCBA
Concepts and Principles is 24 of the 175 scored questions, the second-largest domain, and it has 24 tasks, more than any other. It is the vocabulary of the field put to work: almost every question gives a short scenario and asks you to name the contingency, the schedule, the motivating operation or the verbal operant that is operating.
- Share of the exam
- 24 of 175 scored questions (14%) on every exam form
- Outline tasks
- 24 (B.1 to B.24)
- Our drill
- 10 questions from 74 concepts and principles questions, untimed, an explanation after every answer; one free attempt, unlimited with a pass
What concepts and principles questions test
- Behavior, response and response class; stimulus and stimulus class; respondent versus operant conditioning (tasks B.1–B.3)
- Positive and negative reinforcement and punishment, automatic versus socially mediated contingencies, and unconditioned, conditioned and generalized reinforcers and punishers (tasks B.4–B.8)
- Simple schedules (FR, VR, FI, VI) and compound schedules: concurrent, multiple, mixed and chained (tasks B.9–B.10)
- Operant and respondent extinction as operations and as processes, including extinction bursts and spontaneous recovery (task B.11)
- Stimulus control, discrimination, stimulus and response generalization, and maintenance (tasks B.12–B.15)
- Motivating operations and how they differ from discriminative stimuli; rule-governed versus contingency-shaped behavior (tasks B.16–B.18)
- Verbal operants (mand, tact, echoic, intraverbal, textual, transcription, autoclitic) and multiple control (tasks B.19–B.20)
- Emergent relations and generative performance, behavioral momentum, the matching law, and imitation versus observational learning (tasks B.21–B.24)
Sit the full exam under the real clock
185 questions across all nine domains in 4 hours, with a score for concepts and principles so you know where you stand.
Free concepts and principles drillHow to study it
- Classify every example in two steps: did a stimulus get added or removed, and did the behavior go up or down in the future? Positive and negative mean added and removed, never good and bad.
- For motivating operations, ask whether the event changes how valuable a consequence is (an MO) or signals that the consequence is available (an SD).
- Learn the controlling variable for each verbal operant: motivation for a mand, a nonverbal stimulus for a tact, a verbal stimulus with point-to-point correspondence for an echoic, and so on.
- Write your own examples. If you can invent a clean example of a mixed schedule or a CMO-R, you will recognize one in a question.
Common questions
Which concepts and principles topics come up most on the BCBA exam?
The 6th-edition outline gives this domain 24 tasks, so the questions are spread widely. Reinforcement and punishment contingencies, schedules of reinforcement, motivating operations versus stimulus control, extinction, generalization and verbal operants account for most of the tasks.
What is the difference between a motivating operation and a discriminative stimulus?
A motivating operation changes how effective a consequence is as a reinforcer or punisher and how often behavior that has produced it occurs. A discriminative stimulus signals that the consequence is available because responding has been reinforced in its presence. Food deprivation is an MO; the open sign on a restaurant is an SD. Task B.17 tests exactly this distinction.
185 questions across all nine domains in 4 hours, with a score for concepts and principles so you know where you stand.
Free concepts and principles drillThe other BCBA domains
Sources
Original practice questions for exam preparation, written to the BACB’s BCBA Test Content Outline (6th ed.) and the Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts (2022). Independent practice, not affiliated with or endorsed by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB). BCBA® and BACB® are registered trademarks of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board.