Many BCBA’s tend to struggle with how to individualize and teach complex skills. Despite being able to program beautifully for beginning- level skills, some BCBA’s are not able to make the jump to creating programs for high-level skills. A few skills that are frequently hard to teach and generalize are:
- Reading Comprehension
- Answering Wh- questions (who, what, when, where, why)
- Inferencing
Some have argued that this programming is difficult because our science doesn’t have all the tools needed, and recently some have suggested adding new principles and concepts to cover some of the missing gaps. Maybe we need to do this. I’m undecided on this issue. There is a huge on-going debate about this, and I don’t intend to dip into that here.
Today, I’ll just cover one of the basics of good programming that often seems to be missing when we fail to teach these skills. I call this assessment procedure “Find the Breakdown.” That simply means finding the specific point where the learner’s understanding is lacking and teaching specific skills to enable them to perform the task.
For example, let’s say a learner is learning the names of common nouns. After some instruction, the learner can accurately name some pictures, i.e. cat, shoe, juice, hat, and swing. Now, when the teacher introduces a new picture (maybe dog), the learner becomes a bit confused—sometimes they say cat, and sometimes they say dog. Typically, this type of problem can be solved relatively easily by simply providing a variety of examples of dogs and cats until the learner can tell the difference between the two types of animals. In this case, the breakdown is simple; the learner doesn’t understand the difference between dogs and cats. No one is likely to miss it, and solving the problem is relatively simple.
Later, when the learner becomes more sophisticated and has learned hundreds, maybe thousands of words, finding the breakdown isn’t as simple. Now we are trying to teach the learner to answer wh- questions, make inferences, or do reading comprehension, and they aren’t getting it. Finding the breakdown is much more difficult since the issue is usually not as obvious as in the cat vs. dog problem above.
What tends to happen in this situation is a BCBA, speech pathologist, or special education teacher will throw spaghetti and see what sticks. They just try stuff. He is a visual learner, so what if we add some pictures? How about a 2nd prompter? What if we reduce the length of the passage, and slowly build it up to higher levels? Etc. etc. Of course, sometimes these types of interventions might work, and reinforces just “doing something.”
A much better procedure than throwing spaghetti is to take a small amount of time to do an analysis. If the child is failing to acquire the new skill you are teaching, first figure out why before throwing spaghetti. For example, if you are attempting to teach the learner to answer reading comprehension questions and not succeeding, there might be a variety of reasons. The procedure is simple: Make your best educated guess as to why the learner is failing to acquire the skill, and then briefly test the hypothesis. For example:
- The passage includes vocabulary the learner doesn’t understand. Possible test: Can the learner answer accurately when we carefully control the vocabulary?
- The learner might be able to read accurately, but is so slow that they can’t understand what he or she read. Possible test: Can the learner answer accurately if an adult reads the passage?
- The learner doesn’t understand the difference between certain words in the questions (e.g., who vs. where). Possible test: Can the learner match pictures of people to “who,” and pictures of places to “where”?
Once the cause of the learning problem becomes clear, it is usually a simple manner to design an effective teaching program. If you do this one simple thing, you will get dramatically better at programming.