Most children develop some early learning skills with virtually no effort on the part of the parents. Some of these skills are absolutely critical for the child’s development. For example, at about 8 months of age, children start imitating others. Imitation is absolutely critical for learning social skills, language skills, motor skills, and cognitive skills; development is significantly impaired without imitation.
As BCBAs, we sometimes work with learners who have not acquired imitations skills naturally. Fortunately, our research literature has taught us that most of these children can be taught imitation skills, and that the imitation skills can be used to help the child learn a variety of other types of skills. Unfortunately, I see a common mistake in the teaching of these skills that often delays the process significantly. Why? Poorly designed measurement procedures lead to poorly designed treatments — A common theme on this blog.
Often, BCBAs use the same measurement procedure for all of their programs: progress is measured by number of objectives mastered along with mastery criteria. For example, for three consecutive sessions, the student demonstrates the skill with 90% accuracy, and with two different people. Now, that might be a reasonable process if you are teaching the child something like learning a new word, letters, numbers, colors, or shapes. But when applied to a skill like imitation, things are likely to go wrong.
Why? If you teach the child a new word, you want them to remember it. If the child learns the words juice, shoe, and ball, hopefully, he or she doesn’t forget the words the next week. You want to build on skills like that and teach more words. So, focusing on the number of words mastered is reasonable.
But when you are teaching imitation, there shouldn’t be any concerns about whether the child remembers the previous examples taught. The goal is not to teach something like “arms up,” “clap hands,” or “stomp foot.” The goal is for the child to get the concept of imitation. No matter what we do, the child makes a reasonable attempt at imitation—Damn, is that teapot motion tricky!
We know from the research literature that some children require many, many examples to acquire imitation. Sometimes hundreds of examples. What often happens is a program will spend huge amounts of time focusing on trying to teach the child to learn the difference between the same three examples. In my view, that is an enormous waste of time. It would be much better to simply give novel examples. Each time the child learns one, introduce a new one. To measure progress, record how many trials it took to acquire a new imitation skill rather than focusing on the accuracy. Don’t worry about whether he or she remembers it the next day. This is a much better way to judge progress for this type of skill. When the child starts getting novel examples correct, you’ve done it! That’s the goal. Now, you can probably go back to any of the old examples, and the child will be able to imitate it. Also, you’ll probably be able to use this newly acquired skill to teach other skills.
The same logic can be applied to many early learning programs that have similar criteria. The most common place where I think this change can move things much quicker is the following two types of skills:
Imitation of all types (e.g., actions, actions with objects, gross motor, fine motor, vocal, from videos, complex sequences, peer play, etc)
Matching of all types (e.g., identical objects, non-identical objects, pictures, pictures to objects, objects to pictures, colors, shapes, etc.)