Motivated but Stuck? Here’s Why Learners Aren’t Progressing
Motivation is central in Applied Behavior Analysis.
We spend a great deal of time and energy identifying the stuff that motivates our learners. We emphasize pairing. We talk about preference assessments. And we do this because we know it works. Motivation is foundational to behavior change.
But it isn’t the whole story.
Often, we see learners who are well-motivated—excited even—but they still don’t acquire and master the skill we’re trying to teach them. The environment is enriched, the reinforcers are on point, the learner is engaged… but progress stalls.
Why?
Because motivation can only take you so far without sound instructional design.
Prompting Is Not Programming
When a learner doesn’t acquire a skill, a green BCBA may simply default to changing the prompt hierarchy.
Verbal prompts. Gestural prompts. Physical prompts. Least-to-most. Most-to-least. We fade. We reintroduce. We modify.
But we rarely take a step back and redesign the program itself.
This is a critical oversight.
If the learner is motivated—but still isn’t learning—it may not be a prompting issue. It’s likely a programming issue. And too often, that means the instructional design itself is underdeveloped or overcomplicated.
Understanding What You’re Teaching
Effective program design starts with a clear understanding of the concept being taught.
Let’s take a simple example: teaching a learner to receptively identify a “kitchen.”
We may present an array of images of common rooms and ask the learner to select “kitchen” form that array. If they struggle, we prompt. Maybe we offer a gestural prompt, or fade to a verbal one. But at no point do we stop and ask:
Does this learner even understand what a kitchen is?
To illustrate this point, let’s return to the example above. Again, pretend you’re trying to teach a learner to receptively identify a picture of a kitchen from an array of 8 or 10 pictures of other common rooms in the average home. We begin by asking the learner to select kitchen. When they error, we decide to repeat the instruction (a verbal prompt). When they continue to error, we decide to gesture toward the correct picture. It works. For the next several days—with the assistance of the gesture prompt—they accurately select “kitchen” from the large array. Hooray! Naturally, we fade the gesture prompt back to a verbal. But…alas…the errors continue and they continue to select pictures of other “rooms”.
What do we do?
We must look at the design of our program.
To teach the concept of “kitchen,” we need to ask ourselves: What makes a kitchen a kitchen?
It’s not just a room. It’s a room with specific functional features: a refrigerator, a stove, a sink, a place to prepare food. The combination of these features often makes up a kitchen. Learners who don’t grasp these core features aren’t likely to respond accurately—no matter how many prompts we offer.
Teaching the Concept, Not Just the Label
This principle applies beyond identifying rooms.
Let’s talk about street safety.
If you’re teaching street safety, a learner must understand the difference between a street and a sidewalk. It’s not enough to practice walking safely while holding an adult’s hand (a physical prompt). The moment we fade our physical prompt, they may still bolt into traffic. They need to conceptualize what a street and sidewalk are…at their core. An error in this skill area is dire. You can walk around on a sidewalk with a learner thousands of times holding their hand (a physical prompt) but it will not teach a learner that streets have curbs and cars, while sidewalks are narrower and have people.
That’s conceptual understanding—and it’s at the heart of effective program design.
To design the right instructional program, we need to identify the exact stimuli the learner must attend to in order to respond accurately.
We must ask: What does the learner need to see or recognize in order to understand this concept?
What stimuli do WE attend to to determine that a kitchen is a kitchen?
What do WE look at to determine that a street is a street?
What do we attend to to determine is probably sharp versus probably dull? scalding halt versus blistering cold?
Whatever these features are, we have to get our learners to them. We can’t simply prompt kids through things.
Motivation Matters—But It’s Not the Finish Line
Reinforcement and motivation create the conditions for learning. But they aren’t a substitute for targeted, well-designed teaching.
We need to train ourselves—clinicians, supervisors, and behavior analysts—to spend as much time developing elegant instructional programs as we do identifying and understanding reinforcement.
That means practicing concept analysis. It means understanding what you’re teaching at its core. What is the concept you’re teaching? And it means engineering learning opportunities that help learners attend to the right details—not just perform under guidance and reward.
BCBAs are often highly skilled at finding what motivates a learner. But motivation alone doesn’t produce mastery.
What does this learner need to see, understand, and attend to in order to learn the thing we’re trying to teach them?
When we answer that, we go from managing existing skills to truly teaching new ones.
Martin Myers is a BCBA with a passion for helping improve the field of ABA. He is the creator of BxMastery, with over 4,000 goal ideas, sequenced, to inspire your programming. With 10+ years of experience in the field, he’s dedicated to empowering others and fostering positive change through effective leadership and communication. Connect with Martin on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for more insights and updates.