Preference assessments are a set of procedures that are often used to select what items people with disabilities prefer in order to use those items as reinforcers when teaching. I do think that the research on preference assessments has produced some valuable knowledge for the field, but I’m skeptical that the procedures themselves are very useful for practitioners. Nevertheless, I’ve sat through many, many conference presentations where they act as if you would have to be crazy not to use such a well-validated set of procedures.
Preference assessments take significant time. There are a variety of different methods of selecting preference, but they all take time away from instruction. This recent research compared formal preference assessments with “in-the-moment reinforcer analysis” and found them both to be effective, but the in-the-moment reinforcer analysis was substantially more efficient. Of course, if you don’t have to spend a lot of time on the preference assessment and can just teach, you get more done in less time.
In the moment reinforcer analysis is basically just looking at the child to determine if he was interested by using things like affect—did the child appear happy? Did the child make statements to suggest he was enjoying the item? There are other procedures such as rotation of reinforcers to make sure the child doesn’t get bored with an item and conditioning new items.
You might say “of course.” But that didn’t stop me from using formal assessments for a long time.
In addition to saving time, staff will be much more effective in the long run if you stop using preference assessments:
- Good therapists need to learn to assess the child in the moment. There are many situations where it simply won’t be possible to do a preference assessment. We work in classrooms, homes, and community settings. If you can’t assess “in-the-moment” you just won’t be effective.
- Good therapists need to learn procedures like conditioning new things as reinforcers and rotating reinforcers. These will help substantially improve results over time.
- Good therapists need to be creative and try a lot of things. If you had to put everything into a formal preference assessment before you tried it, the odds of trying lots of things will go down dramatically.
- Good therapists recognize that there are thousands of small subtle ways that the therapist interacts with the child that we can’t always measure exactly. (e.g., the way the therapist smiles, flips her hair, voice volume, tone, or plays with the child and the object). These interactions can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of a specific thing as a reinforcer.
As usual, more research is needed. While we are waiting, I think there is enough evidence and logic on the side of “in-the-moment reinforcer analysis” to justify that recommendation for practitioners.