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Verbal Behavior Eval 7/2001

Program Evaluation

CK

I had the opportunity to interact with CK, a five-year-old boy with a diagnosis of autism, on the morning of June 24, 2001. Prior to meeting CK, I reviewed his most recent Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills (ABLLS), updated in March of this year, as well as Cynthia Hurtt's Program Summary, dated May 30, 2001. CK's parents had demonstrated an interest in moving away from classic discrete trail instruction toward an errorless learning paradigm, complete with systematic task interspersal, and with a focus on teaching CK to make the critical behavioral transfers between his receptive, tact, and intraverbal repertoires.

It was a pleasure for me to work with CK during my consultation. I was able to demonstrate instruction delivered quickly, and using an antecedent prompt and test (errorless) instructional method rather than an instructional "no". I also used a high rate of high probability (previously acquired) responses with him during acquiaition tasks. He responded quite well to this strategy and his attention was focused on me for extended periods of time with tasks he had previously demonstrated difficulty with, e.g., receptive identification of alphabet letters, tacting alphabet letters, tact-intraverbal transfers of some basic conceptual knowledge, etc. During and after modeling this instructional strategy, I made the following recommendations for his overall program:

• Discontinue programs like "Reciprocal Social Questions" that require a more complex tact and intraverbal repertoire than he currently displays
• Increase his performance in visual performance areas such as seriation, patterning, and sequencing
• Provide him with explicit social-linguistic rules about question asking to combat his over generalization of specific question forms
• Move all of his current feature, function, category, attribute, etc, programming to the task interspersal method demonstrated by me with a focus on making systematic and elegant receptive-tact and consequently, tact-intraverbal transfers.
  • I would recommend reviewing language targets he has learned receptively through this new format.
    • Targets should be added 5 at a time in a cumulative manner
    • Please remember to keep the high probability - newly introduced targets at about an 80%-20% ratio until CK's acquisition begins to become more rapid. I would be happy to review his data and provide recommendations for adjusting this ratio in the future.
    • In addition, I would recommend probing the targets for roughly the first 10 minutes of each session, after which solid errorless instruction should occur for the remainder of the session. As CK acquires more targets, a systematic probing schedule may need to be developed.
• Systemically decrease his thumb sucking behavior
• Systematically decrease his "stalling" verbal behavior, e.g., using words like actually, probably, I guess, etc. via rapidly paced instruction. Eliminating these verbal behaviors from his instructional time should serve to speed up his overall performance by building the behavioral momentum necessary to make the transfers described above.

I have included the following information with this summary:

• Several individualized programs for the team to consider implementing
  • Program 1
  • Program 2
  • Program 3
  • Program 4
  • Program 5
  • Program 6
  • Program 7
• A sample program sheet focusing on Skinner's categories of verbal behavior
• A sample data sheet corresponding to some of Skinner's categories of verbal behavior
• A sample conceptual matrix to ensure that each language target introduced or reviewed with CK is thoroughly covered

As discussed during my consultation, I would like to review a therapy tape of CK and his tutors in the next several weeks. In addition, I would be happy to consult with the team on targets to be introduced as well as the organization of the new system. I would also be happy to review session data on a regular schedule to facilitate CK's progress. Please note that the programs I have included in this report may not fit well within the task interspersal paradigm and may require some additional time set aside within the context of a session.

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and working with CK and his team. I have no doubt that this bright little boy will make rapid and sustained progress with the program recommendations made in this report. Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of further assistance.