What to Consider for BACB Fieldwork Tracking

Payam Moghaddam
October 6, 2023
07 Mins read
BACB,Supervision

You are reading this post because you are probably an upcoming BCBA or BCaBA and you are trying to figure out a documentation system for your fieldwork. You understand the requirements, you understand the purpose, but BACB’s main guidance for you is

you must use your own documentation system to track your field hours

So, what now? What should you consider for your documentation system so that it is easy to use, yet auditable?

As with any system, there are a range of capabilities it must have for the job, ranging from the “Essentials” to the “Ideals”. Essential requirements are typically catered to by multiple solutions or apps, but once you start your fieldwork and your requirements expand, what may have been “Ideal” becomes essential, and you may find yourself with zero options then. This post is intended to clarify the wide set of requirements you should consider when selecting your documentation system, so that it serves you fully throughout your fieldwork and does not require you to switch systems midway.

Pyramid of Requirements

Not all requirements are equal, but all requirements are important to keep in mind and consider. As such, we’ll use an analogous “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” to visualize this and then we’ll systematically analyze the pyramid’s layers and implications.

BACB Fieldwork Considerations — Pyramid of Requirements for BACB Fieldwork

Essential Requirements

At an absolute minimum, you need a solution that will:

Facilitate scheduling sessions with your supervisor
Tracks your independent sessions and hours
Documents each session or supervision with a few required fields

These required fields are outlined in BACB’s respective handbooks for BCBAs and BCaBAs.

BACB's Required Documentation Fields — From the BCBA Handbook as of 06/29/2023

To meet these essential requirements, the first option people consider is to use a collaborative spreadsheet (e.g., Google Sheet or Office 365 Excel) plus a convenient scheduling solution (e.g., Calendly or Office 365’s Booking). With a row per session, and columns per required field, you should be able to create a view similar to the following.

Example List of Independent and Supervision Sessions — Whether a spreadsheet or a dedicated tool such as Behaview, you want to have a way to easily track your sessions.

So are you done? From a purely audit perspective, perhaps, but the foundation of supervision is to develop supervisees’ skills so they become a competent ABA practitioner. Meeting on time and documenting those sessions is not sufficient, it’s only essential. Furthermore, a basic spreadsheet solution is not easy to update and track when you are an on-the-go professional. You need more foundational requirements addressed in order for your supervisions to be effective.

Foundational Requirements

BACB’s Task Lists are an excellent guide on what you should be learning and thus it’s a natural reference for you and your supervisor to assess progress against. The easier it is for you to integrate BACB’s Task List into your supervision sessions, and track your progress against it, the more prepared you’ll be for the upcoming exam and potential audits regarding what your supervisions involved.

Great! but… how? You can extend a basic spreadsheet to hold yet another sheet for the Task List, but how will you now associate your session data with your Task List data? Furthermore, how do you expect to update this data and keep your supervisor posted? If fieldwork data and progress is not easy to access and update, it’s easy for inconsistencies to emerge or meetings to happen simply to meet requirements rather than to enhance learning.

You want to create a shared view with your supervisor that let’s you both see your mastery against BACB’s Task List and have it inform you regarding what to prioritize in subsequent supervision sessions.

Example Skill Progression Tracker for a Staff — You want a view that lets you see progress against BACB's Task List, similar to the following from Behaview.

Even with these Foundational requirements supported, how to make it easy to regularly review and report on is an important factor.

Important Requirements

As per BACB’s guidance, you’ll want to make sure you have a system in place that lets you review your documentation and be able to generate the required metrics for submitting your monthly forms.

BACB Guidance to Regularly Review Sessions — From the BCBA Handbook as of 06/29/2023

Fortunately, if you’ve addressed the essential requirements properly, this should be easy to monitor and generate reports from. Typical spreadsheet solutions will provide you this information. However, if you’ve been relying on paper tracking or meeting invites to keep track of your hours, you’ll be in for a lot of pain.

An important point here to consider is the “traceability” of your reports. Your reports should be derived from your session data. If you are capturing “Bulk Hours” without a clear trace to the actual sessions for those hours, then your entries may be at risk of scrutiny.

Behaview's BACB Fieldwork Report View — You want to make sure you have a report view of your progress, with an easy way to validate particular sessions.

Most solutions catering to ABA practitioners tend to meet requirements up-to this point. However, there are even more factors to consider that may become critical to you over time.

Desirable Requirements

In an ideal world, your single supervisor can meet all your supervisory contact and hourly requirements, and your supervisions can happen in-person or at least synchronously online. What happens though if:

Your supervisor travels and makes it challenging to setup observations with a client?
Your supervisor asks you to share permanent products? Where will you store it?
Your supervisor cannot provide you enough supervision contacts?

Regarding the client observation requirement, BACB supports in-person, synchronous (e.g., live video conference), and asynchronous (e.g., recorded video) formats.

BACB's Observation with Client Requirement — From the BCBA Handbook as of 06/29/2023

However, to tap into this asynchronous flexibility, you need a secure and compliant mechanism to share videos. Especially for clinics, it becomes important to establish what solution you can use that is compatible with the clinic’s policies. As you may be aware, sharing videos by e-mail or various messaging software is not considered secure nor compliant! Furthermore, your storage solution should ideally give your supervisor a mechanism to provide focused feedback. For example, timestamped comments will allow your supervisor to provide specific feedback which are directly tied to the instance of behaviour they would like to address.

Behaview's Video Review and Commenting Capability — Consider where you can securely store videos so your supervisor can asynchronously view them.

Despite this option, supervisees may still struggle to meet the required hours and may seek supervision from multiple supervisors. If you are in an organization with multiple supervisors, this will be relatively easy. However if you require multiple supervisors from multiple organizations, there are necessary requirements from BACB that you must meet for your hours to be eligible.

Multiple Supervisors from Multiple Organizations

BACB requires fieldwork requirements to be met independently if supervisors are from different organizations.

BACB's Multiple Supervisors Requirement — From the BCBA Handbook as of 06/29/2023

Tracking sessions at this point gets complicated since you need an agreed documentation system between all supervisors and an easy way to aggregate total hours for your personal tracking purposes. While it’s not hard to understand, it does mean significantly more documentation. If you are using a spreadsheet for tracking, you can consider using cross-spreadsheet linking capabilities to create a central reporting view across all workbooks. It’s more complicated, but it will let you keep supervisors’ documentations separate. You want to create a view similar to the following.

Behaview's Multiple Supervisors Review — You ideally have a view that lets you report across organizations to validate your requirements.

Ideal Requirements

Last but not least, a seamless mechanism to incorporate BACB supervision with staff management makes it easier for everyone involved. After all, supervision is an essential part of ABA practice, so why have two separate systems for tracking and performing supervisions? Why not use one approach?

With your supervisor, consider how you can devise a system that can meet both your fieldwork requirements but also serve as a foundation for staff management generally. Not only will this be less overhead for your supervisor, but it will also serve as a natural transition mechanism post-supervision and will maintain your performance history for future reference!

Behaview's Staff Observations Report — BACB Supervisions are similar to regular Staff observations done throughout practice. If you are going to have your supervisor create a new system, ideally they pick one that they can use for other supervisions too (e.g., Staff Overlaps, RBT Assessments).

Evaluation Criteria

There is a lot to a documentation system when you look at it more closely. It’s also a lot to ask from a busy ABA supervisor or supervisee to worry about. Sadly, despite a variety of solutions existing, few support the full set of requirements you may have. This is why we built Behaview. It’s built to be easy to use on any device and with built-in support for BACB’s Task Lists, yet it can extend to support remote supervisions and general staff management too!

Consider using the following evaluation criteria with your supervisor to make sure you have the right system in place to meet your needs.

Requirement Level	Feature	DIY Solution (e.g. Spreadsheet)	Fieldwork Tracking Apps	Behaview
Essential	Document sessions
Essential	Schedule sessions	You require a separate scheduling solution	Majority track completed sessions, not schedule them
Foundational	Assess against BACB’s Task List	You can manually type these tasks in from PDF, then use it going forward	Minority do, while majority don’t
	Track progress against BACB Task List	Can be done manually with a separate spreadsheet	Minority do, while majority don’t
	Mobile support		Majority are web apps which you can access via mobile	Optimized for mobile
Important	Progress reports
Desirable	Secure file and video storage	Separate solution required	Separate solution required
	Asynchronous Supervision			Videos support timestamped comments
	Multi-organization support	Multiple spreadsheets may suffice, but aggregating them will be a separate task
Ideal	Unified supervision and staff management system
Ideal	Centralized supervisee reports

Simple Intention, Complex Implementation

A documentation system may sound simple, but it’s layered in complexity. It’s easy to get started, but hard to keep easy. Fortunately, much of this complexity can be minimized with upfront consideration and planning. Once you have the right system in place, you can focus on learning during supervisions, preparing to pass your board exam, and becoming certified.

Good luck! 😊