Focus on Generalization and Maintenance

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On more than one occasion, I’ve been in the situation that a student will only demonstrate a skill in my presence. And I’ve heard from other colleagues that they have had similar experiences. This is highly problematic. When it happens with one of my students, there is only one person I can blame: myself.  A skill that a student can only demonstrate in my presence is a pretty useless skill and does nothing to promote independence.

So what do you do when you find yourself in this situation? You reteach, with a focus on generalization. This means that, from the very beginning, you are teaching with a wide variety of materials, varying your instructions, asking other adults to help teach the skill, and demonstrating its use in a variety of environments. Preparing activities takes more time on the front-end for the teacher, but saves a ton of time later because your student is more likely to actually master the skill. (Generalization, after all, does show true mastery.)

Hopefully, you don’t have to do this, though. Hopefully, you’ve focused on generalization from the first time you taught the skill. You may see generalization built into materials you already use, such as 300-Noun List at AVB press.

Another commonly cited issue teachers of children with autism encounter is failure to maintain a skill. In my mind, generalization and maintenance go hand-in-hand, in that they require you to plan ahead and consider how, when, and where you will practice acquired skills. Here are a few tips that may help you with maintenance of skills:

  • Create notecards of all mastered skills. During the course of a session, go through the notecards and set aside any missed questions or activities. You might need to do booster sessions on these. (This can also be an opportunity for extending generalization by presenting the questions with different materials, phrases, environments, or people.)
  • Set an alert on your phone to remind you to do a maintenance test two weeks, four weeks, and eight weeks after the student has mastered the skill.
  • Create a space on your data sheets for maintenance tasks to help you remember not only to build maintenance into your programs, but also to take data on maintenance.

Considering generalization and maintenance from the outset of any teaching procedure is incredibly important. Often, when working with students with special needs, we are working with students who are already one or more grade levels behind their typically developing peers. Failing to teach generalization and maintenance, then having to reteach, is a waste of your students’ time.

WRITTEN BY SAM BLANCO, MSED, BCBA

Sam is an ABA provider for students ages 3-15 in NYC. Working in education for twelve years with students with Autism Spectrum Disorders and other developmental delays, Sam utilizes strategies for achieving a multitude of academic, behavior, and social goals. Sam is currently a PhD candidate in Applied Behavior Analysis at Endicott College. She is also a lecturer in the ABA program at The Sage Colleges.

 

 

Thinking Ahead: Self-Determination in the Elementary Years

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Though I typically work with elementary-aged children, I’m consistently thinking about what skills the child needs in order to be independent and ready to transition out of the school setting as an adult.  Sometimes, it may seem that it is too early to be thinking about adulthood when the child is only 8 or 9, but there are things we can, and should, be doing to prepare our students from an early age.

One of my favorite articles addressing this issue is a 2015 article from Teaching Exceptional Children by Papay, Unger, Williams-Diehm, and Mitchell.  (The entire issue is about transition and is a fantastic read. You can view that issue here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tcxa/47/6.) While the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires transition planning to begin at age 16, and some states require it to begin at age 14, if we want to provide more successful outcomes for individuals with special needs, we must begin thinking about the transition into adulthood at a younger age.

Papay et al., suggest focusing on self-determination. “Individuals who are self-determined have better knowledge of their own interests, strengths, and needs, and they carry out their own desires. Self-determined individuals make decisions, set goals, and carry out the necessary steps to ensure their goals are accomplished” (Papay, et al., p. 311, 2016). The authors then go on to suggest activities for incorporating self-determination at the elementary level, such as understanding grades, using responsibility charts, making choices, and problem solving. In the push to get students up to speed with academic skills, we may be leaving out these core skills that provide success in adulthood. And these skills, such as goal-setting and problem-solving are skills that typically developing children need years of practice to develop.

            So, how do you get started? Here are a few suggestions:

  • First, read the full article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0040059915587901
  • Call a meeting of the adults in the child’s life and the child to talk about appropriate goals around these specific skill sets.
  • Write down the ways in which you can incorporate self-determination activities in your student’s daily life.
  • Identify short-term outcomes you would like to see in relation to the activities you’ve identified.
  • Share with your colleagues and other students what you are doing in relation to self-determination to help normalize this conversation on the elementary level.

In recent decades, we have come a long way in providing services for youth with special needs. At this point in time, it is becoming more and more clear that we need to be doing more for adults with special needs, but we can’t wait until the individual is well into their teenage years to begin thinking about it.

Papay, C., Unger, D. D., Williams-Diehm, K., & Mitchell, V. (2015). Begin With the End in Mind Infusing Transition Planning and Instruction Into Elementary Classrooms. Teaching Exceptional Children, 47(6), 310-318.

Focus on Reinforcement

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Teaching can be incredibly overwhelming, especially in a special education classroom. Between paperwork, lesson planning, updating bulletin boards, and actually teaching, the day can get pretty hairy. Sometimes, that stress leads to a short temper, which can lead to a punitive classroom environment.

If things seem to be going in the wrong direction in your classroom, the first thing you should do is focus on reinforcement. Here are a few steps to consider:

  1. Identify 1-3 behaviors you would like to see your students exhibiting. For instance, maybe you’d like to see an increase in hand-raising (as opposed to calling out.) Clearly define the behaviors you want to see.
  2. Set up a contingency for increasing those behaviors. Maybe you’ll wear a MotivAider to give yourself a reminder throughout the day to provide verbal praise to students exhibiting the target behavior. Maybe you’ll have students earn points that they can exchange for other things, such as a homework pass or lunch with the teacher. Maybe you’ll encourage students to recognize each other when they engage in the target behavior.
  3. Teach the students about the target behavior(s). Introduce the goals to the students. It’s helpful to create a sign or other visual to remind students about the new goals.

While these are simple steps, providing more verbal praise and other reinforcement can turn around a classroom with too much time spent on reprimands and punishments.

It’s also helpful to remember (especially for new teachers) that you can make changes at any time. One of my mentors in my first year of teaching told me to tell my class we had gotten off track, so we were having a brand new first day of school. (I was teaching fourth and fifth grade students with emotional behavioral disorders.) It was shocking how well that new first day of school went over. The students were excited about the idea of a “fresh start” in the middle of the school year, and it helped me get back on track with creating a more positive learning environment.

Ultimately, the goal is to teach students about appropriate behavior by spending more time showing them what they’re doing right than focusing on what they’re doing wrong.

 

WRITTEN BY SAM BLANCO, MSED, BCBA

Sam is an ABA provider for students ages 3-15 in NYC. Working in education for twelve years with students with Autism Spectrum Disorders and other developmental delays, Sam utilizes strategies for achieving a multitude of academic, behavior, and social goals. Sam is currently a PhD candidate in Applied Behavior Analysis at Endicott College. She is also a lecturer in the ABA program at The Sage Colleges.

 

Autism and the Peer Review Process

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If one wanted to market a scientifically-unproven intervention, device, or pill as a valid autism treatment to families affected by autism, how would one go about it? Glossy pictures? Glowing testimonials? Miracle claims? Hyped social media pitches? Charming infomercials? Answer: All of the above.

And, here’s another marketing strategy: portraying one’s product as having scientific validation when, in fact, such validation does not exist. To do this, one might make references to “scientific evidence” in material that, upon systematic inspection, is less than convincing.

I was reminded of this when I recently reviewed a web page that boldly claims, “SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Verifies The Son-Rise Program® WORKS!” Findings support the efficacy of parent-delivered SRP intervention for promoting social-communicative behavior in children with autism spectrum disorders.”

What are these findings? On the website, the Son-Rise marketers provide a link to a key source of their “verification” – a paper entitled “Training Parents to Promote Communication and Social Behavior in Children with Autism: The Son-Rise Program”. This paper, written by a trio of Northwestern University researchers, presents a study of the purported benefits of intervention delivered by 35 parents of children with autism who participated in a five-day parent-training course on Son-Rise Program methods, as well as an advanced follow-up course 3-12 months later. Parents completed The Autism Treatment Evaluation Checklist (ATEC), a rating scale that contains items on communication, sociability, cognition, physical status and behavior.

The authors divided the 35 parents into three groups based on how many hours of intervention the parents reported giving their child each week during the interval between their first and second Son-Rise trainings (i.e., no intervention [11 parents], 1–19 hours [13 parents], 20 or more hours [11 parents]). The authors present results reflecting statistically significant higher ATEC scores at second ATEC completion relative to the first, and they suggest that these higher scores reflect real improvements in communication, social skills, and sensory and cognitive awareness. They go on to point out that children with greater gains were more likely to have had more hours of parent-administered SRP.

As linked on the Son Rise web-site, this study is typeset like a published research article, prompting me to try to determine which peer-reviewed journal had published it. Through email correspondence, the third author, Cynthia K. Thompson, reported that the study had not been published because the team had decided to collect additional data prior to submission for peer review. In other words, this study is a “work in progress” and certainly not a verification of treatment effectiveness. In fact, this practice of repeatedly analyzing results prior to the close of data collection is, in itself, problematic from a scientific standpoint, as the process involves conducting many analyses that often yield varying results but are never reported (see Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011).

One of the mechanisms that make science such a powerful engine for progress is the reliance on the peer review process. The scientific method requires that, when a scientist makes an assertion (e.g., “This treatment works!”), (s)he knows that there exists a responsibility to show other scientists how they arrived at their conclusions with enough specificity that others can replicate the study. It is through this process of peer review that faulty assertions about the data are challenged and, hopefully, rejected in short order.

Typically, in the peer review process, an editor reviews a manuscript and, if deemed appropriate, shares the manuscript with a team of reviewers with demonstrated expertise in the relevant subject area. In many cases, these reviewers are “blind” to the identity of the authors and vice-versa, so as to minimize personal biases (e.g., affiliations, personal grudges). The reviewers are charged with the task of evaluating the contents of the manuscript on the basis of scientific merit, including the methodology, statistical analyses of the data and logic of the authors’ conclusions. The reviewers then describe, in writing, their opinions regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the study and make a recommendation regarding publication. The editor synthesizes this feedback and provides a summary to the author(s). In many cases, the editor will reject the manuscript for publication altogether. In other cases, he or she may require revisions, acknowledge limitations, temper conclusions or make other substantive changes prior to publication.

In the case of the manuscript written by Thompson and her colleagues, I suspect that, if it were submitted to a journal with a legitimate peer review process, a multitude of questions would be raised about it, including:

  • participant recruitment (35 self-selected parents out of a pool of 430 parents, many of whom participated in the first training but apparently did not return for more)
  • group distribution (non-random group assignment)
  • the outcome measure (one brief checklist completed by parents)
  • treatment fidelity (no way of verifying the quality or quantity of actual treatment), and
  • control for placebo effect, expectancy bias or any number of potential threats to the validity of responses.

And, despite some effort on the part of the authors to control for this, there is no real way of knowing what other interventions the child was engaged in during the interval between their parents’ first and second Son Rise training.

Of course, scientists who make up peer review committees are vulnerable to the same kinds of human frailties as the rest of humanity (i.e., jealousy, ego, bias, profit motive); however, the communal nature of the process, as well as another scientific safeguard- replication of results by others- helps to minimize the degree to which these frailties impact decisions regarding the quality of a study and our confidence in the results. The scientific method is far from perfect, but it is probably the best game in town for vetting new interventions.

Parents and other consumers of product pitches can watch for treatment claims that look like they have been established through the scientific process but in actuality fall short. Discuss potential treatment options with licensed and/or board certified experts whom you trust. Practice skepticism, especially when fantastical claims are made. Use resources, such as ASAT’s Treatment Summaries for quick reference. Families affected by autism deserve honest, direct communication about the state of the science for treatment options. Accept nothing less.

References

Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science, 22, 1359–1366.

Cite This:

Mruzek, D. W. (2012). Focus on science: “Verification” and the peer review process. Science in Autism Treatment, 9(3), 18-19.

About The Author

Daniel W. Mruzek, Ph.D., BCBA-D is an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), Division of Neurodevelopmental and Behavioral Pediatrics in western New York. He received his doctoral training in Psychology at the Ohio State University and is a former Program Director at the Groden Center in Providence, Rhode Island. Currently, he is an associate professor and serves as a clinician and consultant, training school teams and supporting families of children with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Mruzek coordinates his division’s psychology postdoctoral fellowship program in developmental disabilities and is an adjunct faculty member in the University of Rochester Warner School of Education. He is actively involved as a researcher on several externally funded autism intervention research studies and has authored and co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on autism and other developmental disabilities. Dr. Mruzek is on the editorial board for the journals Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, Behavior Analysis in Practice, Journal of Mental Health Research in Developmental Disabilities, and Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Dr. Mruzek is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Science in Autism Treatment.

To learn more about ASAT, please visit their website at www.asatonline.org. You can also sign up for ASAT’s free newsletter, Science in Autism Treatment, and like them on Facebook!

Who’s Most Qualified To Work With Your Child?

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Parents of children with autism are faced with a wide range of choices when it comes to the education and support of their children. The most important question of all is who’s most qualified to work with your child? Although a great deal of research supports Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) as the only effective treatment for autism, there are still many other interventions that are touted as potentially helpful. Research shows that combining ABA with other interventions is less effective than implementing it alone, with high fidelity and intensity (Howard, 2005).

Not all behavioral professionals are created equal. There is little control over the use of terms like “behavior specialist,” “behavior therapist,” and “behaviorist.” Just about anyone can claim to be one of these, often on the basis of very limited training and virtually no on-going supervision.  Consumers are often not aware that these are uncontrolled titles, and may put their trust in untrained, unsupervised practitioners. 

The problem of lack of quality control in behavior analysis was addressed by the development of state certifications for behavior analysts, and eventually the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) was formed. 

BACB credentials allow consumers some degree of confidence in the education, training, and supervision of the professionals they entrust their children to.  If someone claims to have one of these credentials, consumers should be able to find them on the BACB registries, easily accessed online at www.bacb.com. 

What does the BACB mean for consumers?  Those seeking behavioral interventions for themselves or others can look for professionals who have met the standards of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board with the confidence that that they have a minimum level of education, experience, and supervision and that they are obligated to follow an ethical and professional code.  Whether looking for a school program, privately hiring a professional, or seeking insurance coverage of services, the BACB designations can help consumers to determine if professionals and staff members providing services are well-qualified. They are also not at all easy to accomplish, so it is safe to say that someone with one of these credentials has achieved a high level of understanding of the science of behavior and the practice of behavior analysis.

Some states now license and certify behavioral professionals, and the standards for state licensure and/or certification may be more or less than those required by the BACB.  Having a BACB credential in addition to state licensure ensures that the professional also meets the BACB’s high standards. 

Credential Minimum education requirement Type of work Supervision
Registered Behavior Technician (RBT) High school diploma or equivalent Direct implementation of behavioral interventions (paraprofessionals) Ongoing by a BCaBA, BCBA, or BCBA-D
BCaBA Bachelor’s degree Practice under supervision, supervise RBTs Ongoing by a BCBA or BCBA-D
BCBA Master’s degree Independent practice, supervision of BCaBAs and RBTs None
BCBA-D Doctoral degree Independent practice, supervision of BCaBAs and RBTs None

 

Guest post written by Dana Reinecke, PhD, BCBA-D.

 

References

www.bacb.com, retrieved January 28, 2017

Howard, J. S., Sparkman, C. R., Cohen, H. G., Green, G., & Stanislaw, H.  (2005).  A comparison of intensive behavior analytic and eclectic treatments for young children with autism.  Research in Developmental Disabilities, 26, 359-383.

National Autism Center.  (2015). Findings and conclusions: National standards project, phase 2. Randolph, MA: Author.