I have frequently written on this blog about practical problems that occur when Organizational Behavior Management is implemented poorly in ABA organizations. Today’s focus is the subtle ways goals can lead to learners not doing as well as they should.
In many situations, goals can be extremely helpful. Goals can help us focus our time and attention on what is really important. But when goals are used as a way to evaluate our progress, things often go wrong. The problem is that in most organizations, it is virtually impossible to prevent contingencies being attached to these evaluations, which leads to huge negative effects for our learners.
There are at least three problems that occur frequently when using goals to evaluate progress:
- When everyone knows that they are being evaluated on goals, they now have a huge incentive to set the goal as low as possible.
If I set the goal at 20 and achieve 23, things look great and everyone can see the child is doing well. But, if I set the goal at 25 and achieve 23, I have to report the student did not meet the goal, and possibly come up with an improvement plan. Either way, the child achieved 23. The student’s results are the same. Evaluating staff on whether or not their students meets a goal sets up the situation where staff is rewarded for meeting the objective, not the child making as much progress as possible.
- Teams will want to see regular updates on those goals.
Teams will want to see updates on goals in every area of development (e.g., language, social skills, self-help, reading, math, motor skills, behavior reduction, etc). Although this might seem completely reasonable, sometimes just a few areas are critical for a particular student at a particular time. But if goals are the focus, and you have to report at the monthly team meeting, people focus on too much at once, which will often reduce overall progress. Usually, I can’t show up to a meeting and say we are taking a couple of months off math to focus on critical skills that will make a huge difference in his life – and really, who cares about long division anyway?
- It looks very impressive to have a lot of goals.
When you have a lot of goals, that leads to big, fat program books or long reports with fancy graphs. Everyone is very impressed when a lot of goals are being mastered. Frequently, insurance companies, school districts, advocates, and lawyers will argue for long lists of goals. Goals that are really important, but difficult, are more likely to get ignored. Instead, we end up with long lists of easy to master goals, regardless of their level of importance.
I think the long-term solution is having strong standards. Unfortunately, that will probably take years of research, and I’m not confident that I’ll see that day in my lifetime.
In the meantime, there is a lot that we can do to ease the negative effects of these types of contingencies:
- If you work with individuals with autism and other developmental disabilities, it is almost certain that your organization has this problem. Be honest about the problem. Realize that virtually all funding sources will require goals, so making sure parents, BCBAs, and staff aware that this is a common problem is very helpful.
- Development of goals and objectives is an extremely important task. Don’t take that job lightly. This will focus the time and attention of BCBA’s, RBT’s, teachers, and others for months to come. Do everything possible to ensure that the goals that go into the treatment plan or IEP are things that will really make a difference in the learner’s life.
- Managers should emphasize that they do not evaluate staff on whether or not goals are achieved. Focus on the staff behavior of interest and whether behavior change is occurring. Not whether arbitrary criteria set six months to a year ago are being met.
- Celebrate behavior changes and achieving results with learners. Do everything possible to downplay whether the arbitrary criteria are being met.
- Dramatically exceed goals when appropriate. If, when you started three months ago, 10 seemed impossible so you set the goal at 7, and now the learner can do 139, don’t fret about that. Make the best decision for the learner based on the most recent information.
As long as funding sources require evaluations based on goals, I think this problem will continue to creep up from time to time in virtually any organization. But with smart management, we can mitigate the negative effects.
If you think that you have solved this problem, I’d say look a bit more closely. Are you sure? If you have suggestions on how to reduce or eliminate this problem, I’d love to hear from you. Please contact me.