A common complaint from parents and teachers is that the child is doing “great” in therapy, but they don’t use the skills they learn in therapy “in real life.” Now, there might be a lot of reasons why a particular skill occurs in therapy, but fails to generalize to natural environments. I won’t try to cover them all here as there are too many possibilities, and most of them are well known by BCBAs. Today, I’m just talking about one of those possibilities because it is not well known, easy to overlook, and often the data hides the problem. The problem may be that the child is just not very good at the skill, despite what the data seem to show.
For example, remember when you were first learning to drive. At the beginning, you had to think about everything. Put pressure on the gas, where to hold the steering wheel, and when to push the break. Of course, we all realize when you are driving with someone at that level of skill, you should probably be afraid. Now, you don’t do any of that. You just get in the car and drive; you aren’t thinking about it any longer. When you reach a high level of skill at a task so that you can perform it beautifully without thinking, you have attained what is called fluency.
Many times, I’ve seen children who have “mastered” a particular skill, but actually aren’t very good at the skill yet. A common example involves children who have learned a skill through discrete trial teaching. This might be anything from labeling pictures, pronouns, prepositions, or a wide range of other possibilities. Often, a skill would be considered “mastered” if the child achieves 100% accuracy for a few sessions. We should realize, though, that this is the equivalent to student drivers who are still thinking about everything they are doing. Although they can drive, they aren’t likely to do well under difficult “real-world” driving conditions. Likewise, not reaching fluency is often a major reason why a child can perform a skill while in therapy, but does not generalize the skill to “real life.” This is true for a wide variety of skills in all the relevant domains–social skills, language skills, motor skills, play skills, and more.
The subset of Applied Behavior Analysis practice that emphasizes this type of work is Precision Teaching. For more information, my friend Rick has written the book on the topic.