RBT® Behavior Acquisition practice quiz

Updated 2026-11-05

Behavior Acquisition is domain C of the 2026 RBT® exam and the largest domain: 19 of the 75 scored questions, about 25% of the exam. If you can only drill one domain, this is usually it. Below you get a free 20-question quiz on this domain and 15 items built around the teaching procedures that get confused with each other. Every option is explained.

What this domain covers

Domain C has eleven tasks (C.1 to C.11). The exam asks whether you can:

  • Implement positive and negative reinforcement, delivered immediately and contingently, on schedules, and varied in magnitude, intensity, and type.
  • Establish and use conditioned reinforcers by pairing.
  • Run discrete-trial teaching and naturalistic teaching (incidental teaching, natural environment training).
  • Teach with task-analyzed chaining: forward, backward, and total task.
  • Run discrimination training.
  • Use stimulus and response prompts with appropriate fading: errorless teaching, least-to-most, most-to-least, stimulus fading, time delay.
  • Program for generalization across settings, people, and stimuli.
  • Tell maintenance procedures from acquisition procedures.
  • Implement shaping.
  • Run token economies.

Nearly every question here is a scenario. You read a few lines about a session and pick the procedure being used, the next correct step, or the error.

The five pairs people confuse most

  1. Positive vs. negative reinforcement. Both increase behavior. Positive adds something (praise, a token). Negative removes something (a demand, a loud noise). Negative reinforcement is not punishment; the behavior goes up.
  2. Forward vs. backward vs. total-task chaining. Forward teaches the first step to mastery, then adds the next. Backward prompts all steps except the last, which the learner completes independently, then works back. Total task has the learner attempt every step each trial with prompts where needed.
  3. Stimulus prompts vs. response prompts. A stimulus prompt changes the materials or their arrangement (a bigger target, a highlighted card). A response prompt is help with the response itself (verbal, model, physical). Fading methods differ: stimulus fading for stimulus prompts; least-to-most, most-to-least, and time delay for response prompts.
  4. Shaping vs. chaining. Shaping reinforces successive approximations of one behavior that does not exist yet in its final form. Chaining links behaviors the learner can already do, in a sequence. If the scenario has a task analysis, think chaining.
  5. Acquisition vs. maintenance vs. generalization. Acquisition is learning a new skill, usually with dense reinforcement and prompts. Maintenance is keeping a learned skill over time, usually with thinner schedules. Generalization is using the skill with new people, places, and materials.

Also worth a careful read: discrete-trial teaching vs. naturalistic teaching (who starts the trial and whether the reinforcer is related to the response), and conditioned vs. unconditioned reinforcers (learned through pairing vs. effective without learning).

After this quiz