About AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org

Why We Built This Site, and How it Has Evolved

Applied behavior analysis became a formal discipline in 1968, when three researchers at the University of Kansas, Baer, Wolf, and Risley, published the paper that defined what counts as “applied” behavioral research. It took another thirty years for the field to organize around a national standard: the Behavior Analyst Certification Board wasn’t founded until 1998. State licensing came later still. Nevada and Oklahoma enacted the first state behavior-analyst licensure laws in 2009, and the rest of the country followed after that.

We launched AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEdu.org in 2016, several years into that wave, as more and more states were putting licensing laws on the books. But this was still a time when prospective students had few reliable resources available for finding out which requirements actually applied to them. A decade later, as of 2026, 40 states plus Washington, D.C. have enacted behavior analyst licensure or regulation laws, graduate programs have multiplied, and AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org has grown right alongside all of it.

The growing network of people who contribute to AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org is the biggest part of our growth story. Professors running the graduate programs training the next generation of behavior analysts. Practitioners who took the research out of university labs and into homes, schools, and clinics. Writers who’ve spent a decade turning all of it into something prospective students can actually use to make decisions. AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org exists because the ABA field keeps growing, and because dedicated people keep showing up to help.

Credentialing Expertise: The Rules Behind the Requirements, From the Authority Who Wrote Them

Nevada and Oklahoma enacted the first state behavior-analyst licensure laws in 2009. Massachusetts followed in 2013, after a licensing effort Dorsey and state Rep. John Scibak began in 2007. The person who helped write that bill is someone AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org has been able to call on directly.

Professional Experience: Where the Science Meets Real-World ABA Practice

The expansion of autism insurance mandates in the 2000s and 2010s helped make autism treatment one of ABA’s most visible clinical applications. But the science underlying it was never limited to that population, and some of the field’s more interesting growth has occurred entirely outside insurance-funded clinical settings, in general parenting practices built on the same principles.

Educational Authority: Meet the Faculty Who Weighed In On Key Topics

Dorsey and Waldvogel are just two names. More than 70 faculty members from 61 ABA programs across the country have answered the same kind of questions for us, the ones prospective students actually ask about coursework, fieldwork, and where a degree really leads.

Click through to see each person’s listed faculty page.

The Writers Who Make It Possible

Every guide on AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org starts with a writer who has to translate all of it- the research, the regulations, the professor interviews- into something someone can actually use while deciding their next step. That’s a harder job than it sounds. The team behind AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org has been doing it since 2016, and most of them came to ABA and healthcare writing through their own personal or professional path into the field, not by assignment.

Our Editorial Standards

We don’t summarize secondary sources and call it research. Every certification and licensure claim on AppliedBehaviorAnalysisEDU.org is checked against the BACB’s own certification handbooks, ABAI’s published standards and accreditation criteria, and state licensing board regulations.

Salary and employment figures come directly from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, which is tied to broader occupational code categories that include BCBAs, BCaBAs, and RBTs.

Where the research truly conflicts, we say so instead of picking whichever answer reads more cleanly. And when we want a diversity of real perspectives, not just published sources, we go directly to the people who know best: practicing professionals and the faculty members in our interview series, speaking from firsthand experience running their own programs. Several of them also review the sections of this site that draw on their expertise before we publish, checking our summary of the field against what they actually see day-to-day.

We revisit content when laws change, when BACB or ABAI standards are updated, or when new information emerges that supersedes old data. If you find something that looks outdated, tell us. Reach us at [email protected].