Agility: What It Is, How to Measure It, and How to Use It

Abstract

A positive and expected by-product of a well-programmed instructional sequence is an escalation of learning, where skills are acquired more quickly as teaching goes on. Despite the importance of this effect in behavior analysis and education, techniques for detecting and analyzing it are rarely observed in practice settings. A behavioral approach to this phenomenon is rooted in the term agility, which has persisted in the precision-teaching community as a description of desirable acquisition patterns. Precision teachers have long carried forward a loose definition of agility as “celerating celerations.” Although this definition might succeed in generally orienting practitioners toward the goal of helping people acquire new skills more quickly, its lack of technical specificity has hindered efforts to fully integrate such analyses into practice. In this article, the authors define agility and distinguish it from other concepts common to education and behavior analysis. Further, a tutorial for quantifying and analyzing agility using frequency, celeration, and bounce multipliers is presented in detail. Finally, the practical implications afforded by analyses of agility are delineated.