Why Choose Us?

Our passion is to help you make a difference on climate change, whether you are an experienced environmental professional, educator, or just starting out.

We synthesize the latest behavioral science demonstrated to change environmentally relevant behavior, and translate the lessons learned to help you make a climate difference. Our approach is interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and collaborative. Our online learning platform builds upon twenty years of experience designing effective courses.

Our experience with online education, behavior change, outreach campaigns, policy, and local, national, and global conservation means we know what works. Our background ranges from grassroots campaigns to international policies, and from sustainable development to natural resource management of land, freshwater, and oceans.

Our passion is to help you make a difference on climate change, whether you are an experienced environmental professional, educator, or just starting out as a practitioner. We synthesize the latest behavioral science demonstrated to change environmentally relevant behavior, and translate the lessons learned to help you make a climate difference. Our approach is interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and collaborative. Our online learning platform builds upon twenty years of experience designing effective courses.

Our reliance on data and evidence for effective mastery of skills places the emphasis where it belongs - on “learning”. In the end, it is not about what we teach, but rather, what is learned.

The CBC/BDS Difference

The Center for Behavior and Climate builds upon the educational experience of BDS. At BDS, we engage students in learning exercises, with questions equipped with instructional content, text references, and real-time corrective feedback.Our instructional design model is evidence-based to enable learning using the most effective methodologies for mastering, retaining, and generalizing skills. We also apply a scientific approach to evaluating each training module we create. The result is cost-effective and efficient learning outcomes.

The Fluency Model: When faster is better

Our model is based on the early pioneering work of behavior analysts such as Ogden Lindsley and other researchers, who emphasized the role of behavioral fluency in skill mastery and effective learning These researchers showed that “accuracy” or correctness of a response is not a sufficient criterion for mastery. Instead, a minimum rate of responding was key to mastering and building more complex skills. Accuracy and rate of response combined are referred to as “fluency” – rapid, effortless, correct responding: building skills to the point where the learner can produce the correct response “automatically.” This innovative approach to skill mastery became the foundation for fluency-based instructional methods and transformed the efficiency of instructional programming in education (Binder, 1996 for a review). Since its early roots, the effectiveness, durability, and utility of fluency-based instruction have been extensively researched. Fluency or quality-plus-pace approach to learning has been demonstrated to positively impact information retention and maintenance and the application of learned information to new and novel situations (see Binder 1996). Fluency of response has been studied in online and computer learning as well. Research has demonstrated that computer-generated learning tasks incorporating fluency strategies have been effective in teaching concepts in applied behavior analysis (Yaber-Oltra, 1993) and in teaching concept formation using multiple choice questions (Fox and Ghezzi, 1993).

Best Practices

We combine fluency-focused instruction with other empirically validated behavioral learning strategies to provide on-going performance analysis and feedback, promoting rapid and durable skill acquisition in any content area.

For example;

- encouraging spaced practice to better learn and retain material (e.g., Caple, 1996) building fluency using multiple exemplars (e.g., Marzullo-Kerth et al, 2011);

- careful question construction to ensure that learning questions maintain stimulus control over the correct response (e.g., Strough, 1993);

- immediately reinforcing correct responses and providing feedback for incorrect responses (e.g.,Kelley and McLaughlin, 2012); and

- providing a record of individual data on acquisition and fluency performance on both correct and incorrect responding (Cooper, Heron & Heward, 2007; Worsdell, Iwata, Dozier, Johnson, Neidert & Thomason, 2005.)