Inclusion of children with autism in general education classrooms can have wonderful academic and social benefits. But those benefits don’t always occur. I often see parents and educators focusing on whether or not the child is in the classroom, not if the child is actually learning any skills while there. I’ve seen many situations where the child is present, but isn’t learning much. Sometimes nothing at all. That would suggest the services being offered are not appropriate, but whether or not that’s true is hard to measure.
There is no situation where we can provide appropriate behavior analytic services without collecting data. Sure, schools usually require some regular testing. That might be appropriate in some cases, but often the testing is too infrequent to use as an on-going measurement for how much learning occurs in the classroom. I have seen many BCBA’s struggle with this problem. Many measurement systems I have seen simply fail to capture the data needed to make decisions. It can be difficult to measure the effects of inclusion for several reasons:
- In a general education classroom (especially in the younger grades), the child is often prompted a lot by general education teachers, special education teachers, and other classroom helpers. If the child is not given enough opportunity to respond independently, progress is difficult to measure.
- One of the benefits of inclusion is social opportunities. But often, peers will help their friends with autism with academic tasks, which can limit opportunities for data collection.
- General education teachers often move through topics quickly. There might not have been enough opportunities for assessment as the teacher has moved on to a new lesson.
- One common comment from teachers is that “all the children are having difficulty with XXX,” with the implication that we don’t have to measure whether the instruction was effective for the student with autism because ineffective instruction is being delivered to all the students.
- Often IEPs include modifications that can make evaluation difficult. For example, often the child is given multiple choices to fill in the blank questions. This can make evaluation difficult because, as we know, multiple choice questions can be super-easy or super-difficult depending on the contrast between the choices:
2 +3 = __
(a) 786
(b) 2941
(c) 5
There is a relatively simple (but not easy) solution to this problem. It isn’t easy because it takes significant time and coordination with school teams, but I have found it will consistently give the data needed to make important educational decisions. I call it the Classroom Learning Measure. Here is how to do it:
- The BCBA meets with the general education teacher to obtain the most important objectives that the children are expected to acquire in upcoming lessons.
- The BCBA creates a simple assessment that measures the objective.
- Give the assessment to child before the teacher begins teaching this objective, without any prompting or support.
- The child goes to class with all the supports designed by the IEP team (e.g., push in services from special education teacher, speech, modifications, etc)
- Give the assessment to the child again after the teacher has taught the topic, without any prompting or support.
- In a few situations, I’ve been lucky enough to get approval to have all children in the classroom tested in this way so that we can see how well the child with autism is learning compared to his or her peers.
Once these data are collected, teams now have valuable information. In some cases, teams will find that the services are effective. But in my experience, many will find that the services are not effective, and significant modifications are needed in order to produce successful academic outcomes. In my view, it is not sufficient that a child is “present” in the classroom. The child has a right to acquire skills too. Too often, we aren’t checking to see if this is occurring.