Hi Rasmus is proud to announce a new partnership with Courtney Tarbox, BCBA of FirstSteps for Kids, and Morgan van Diepen, BCBA of BIP Visualized, bringing Kind Extinction to the Hi Rasmus curriculum library as free content for ABA practices and multidisciplinary teams using the platform.
Why This Matters Now
Assent-based practice is and should be the direction the entire field of ABA care is moving. The BACB’s ethics code now requires behavior analysts to obtain informed consent and honor assent when applicable, and clinicians everywhere are asking the same question: how do we decide which expectations are truly essential in the moment for safety, health, and daily functioning, while still honoring a learner’s right to say “not right now”?
This framework for guiding when to use kind extinction was developed to address that question. Developed by Courtney Tarbox et al., and validated in peer-reviewed research, kind extinction is a procedural modification of traditional extinction that pairs a functionally arbitrary reinforcer, genuine positive regard and validation, contingent on interfering behavior, with the ongoing extinction procedure itself. In practice, that means staff can continue to keep an expectation in place, while also providing warmth, connection, and emotional support.
The research backing this approach is compelling: across participants, kind extinction produced a meaningful decrease in interfering behavior alongside gains in replacement behaviors, and caregivers and staff rated the approach as socially acceptable to traditional extinction procedures. That’s the kind of social validity data that turns a clinical technique into something teams actually want to implement and families actually trust.
What’s Now Available in the Hi Rasmus Curriculum Library
Through this partnership, Hi Rasmus practices now have exclusive access to:
- The full kind extinction decision-making framework, extending an assent decision model by Breaux and Smith (2023), was built by Courtney Tarbox, BCBA and Dr. Jonathan Tarbox at FirstSteps for Kids, to assess essential vs. non-essential expectations, recognizing assent withdrawal, and step-by-step fidelity checklists for implementation.
- A visual decision-making tool, designed in collaboration with BIP Visualized, that turns a dense clinical protocol into an intuitive, staff-ready flow: when to validate and briefly delay, when to revise the expectation, and when to adjust reinforcement, all without ever compromising the essential expectation itself.
- Role-specific instruction sets, with dedicated guidance for professionals implementing the procedure and separate, simplified guidance appropriate for the broader care team.
Why We Built This With BIP Visualized
If you’ve ever handed a new RBT a 12-page behavior intervention plan and watched their eyes glaze over by page three, you already understand the problem BIP Visualized was built to solve. Traditional BIPs live as dense, text-heavy documents, technically accurate, but genuinely hard for a busy staff member to internalize in the moment a behavior is happening.
BIP Visualized reimagines the behavior intervention plan as a visual, drag-and-drop experience rather than a wall of bulleted text, giving clinicians an interactive, step-by-step flow chart for each strategy, complete with illustrative visuals. The result, according to BIP Visualized’s own pilot data, is plans that go from written to fully built dramatically faster than the traditional process, without sacrificing clinical rigor.
That matters for a procedure like kind extinction specifically because fidelity is everything. A staff member who understands the “why” behind validating a learner’s experience while upholding an essential expectation will implement it more consistently than a staff member handed a checklist with no visual anchor. By pairing the Tarboxes’ clinical framework with BIP Visualized’s approach to translating strategy into something staff can actually picture and follow, we’ve created a resource designed to be used, not just filed away.
This mirrors what broader visual-learning research already tells us: people retain and engage with visual information more reliably than with text alone, which is exactly why ABA Visualized (BIP Visualized’s parent organization) has built its entire training philosophy around making behavioral expertise approachable through visuals rather than jargon.
Kind Extinction was developed by Courtney Tarbox, BCBA and Dr. Jonathan Tarbox of FirstSteps for Kids. The visual decision-making tool was developed in partnership with BIP Visualized. This strategy is informed by peer-reviewed research, including Tarbox, C., Tarbox, J., Bermudez, T. L., Silverman, E., & Servellon, L. (2023). Kind Extinction: A Procedural Variation on Traditional Extinction. Behavior Analysis in Practice.
The decision-making framework that helps guide the clinical decision of when to reinforce assent withdrawal and when to implement kind extinction was developed as an extension of Breaux, C. A., & Smith, K. (2023). Assent in applied behaviour analysis and positive behaviour support: Ethical considerations and practical recommendations. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities, 69(1), 111-121.
