The Behavioral View - "All Things ABLLS:

Stories & Time-Saving Tips from the

ABLLS-R Creator"

welcome to the behavioral view

[Music]
[Music]
hey everyone would you like to get a ceu for this episode listen closely for the
announcement of three secret words
delivered throughout the episode take note of those words and we will tell you where
to go to get your ceu
when the show is over hello everyone and welcome to the very first live broadcast of
the behavioral
view and we're really excited because it seems like maybe we have a lot of new
visitors who haven't seen the show
before so if you are new just to let you know we are a monthly webcast series and
we focus on all topics related to behavior analysis we have a recurring panel that i'm
going
to introduce here in just a few moments um and then we always have a guest and so
what we try to do is get to know that person a little bit and do it sort of a deep dive
into their
area of specialization um but since we are live this is a
little bit more of a different setup than we usually have so we don't normally have
slides on the screen but
we're going to go ahead and just share some information for those of you who may
have some questions
so if we can move on to that housekeeping slide to help me remember everything i'm
supposed to tell you guys so we are recording and at the end of the recording we will
send an email that
will include um that for you guys uh if you're registered it will take probably 24 to
48 hours to process the recording so give us just a little bit of time to get that done
and we want to hear back from you that's
the great thing about going live is that we can get some audience participation here
so we're going to do some polls there will
be three of them throughout the course of the discussion today the first two are
anonymous we're just seeking
information about how you're using the ables and we're gonna you know use that as
jumping off points in our discussion
hopefully um there is also a q a which in a moment
will show you a little screen about how to use that but we want you if you have any
questions go
in the q a we probably won't get to everybody's question today but we will
try and if we don't then we can always follow up with email um
what else you may be here because you want ceus and if you are great news we
are giving those out again at the end of the presentation we will send you an email
with a link to where you go to obtain your ceu for being here you have to be there
here the whole entire time you
have to listen either live or to the recording i'll be throwing out some secret words
at you a few times through out the talk so make sure you jot those down because
you're going to have to know what they
are in order to get your certificate and what else i guess we need to just
show that q a slide there you go so this is how you go
about asking your question we don't have the chat box on so use the q a button
so moving on i think that we can start out by introducing our recurring
panelists as i said we would do i'm going to begin with dr rick kabina who's in the
center of my
screen i don't know if he is of everybody's or not so rick is the director of research
here
at central reach but i know him better as the king of precision teaching
so if you have any interest whatsoever in precision teaching you're bound to have
already
seen his name he is a passionate proponent of the original idea of behavior analysis
being a natural
science and that we should be using those standard measures so that we're living up
to that and uh we're just
thrilled that we get to be guided by his expertise in that matter and i think you'll also
find that he's
one of the nicest people around so if you're into or wanting to become into precision
teaching i encourage you to
read his stuff and reach out to him but he's also not the only precision teacher
around here at central reach we
also have dr carrie milico and carrie is our director of clinical
programming at central reach because she is also a fantastic instructional designer
very passionate about getting
those messages out for behavior analysts and the other thing i think is really
important about carrie and her
contribution to the show is that she is a strong supporter and ally to the
neurodiversity movement and works really
hard to encourage behavior analysts to you know work with compassion as
partners with our clientele and to move towards those those ends and forming those
relationships and solidifying our
role as you know supporting people rather than anything negative that we may have
been perceived
to have done in the past thanks shannon you're welcome so if that that leaves me
with me i am
dr shannon hill i'm editor-in-chief here at the central reach institute i guess right now
if i have a theme that
i like to talk about it's that behavior analysis is defined as the science of teaching and
learning and it shouldn't
be defined as anything less than that so i personally get to use it now to design
instruction um synchronous synchronous asynchronous online instruction for
adults and in the past i've used um with a variety of populations working on
challenging behavior and the environments that elicit it so i see wide applications of
behavior analysis
and use the opportunity to talk about that as much as possible and that is us
but guess what i think that you guys are actually here to talk about someone else
and to hear from someone else and if you're here you probably either are already
very well familiar with the ables or you're trying to become very familiar with the
ables so we are extremely
excited and happy to welcome dr jim hardington not only to the behavioral view but
to
the central reach family thank you so much for joining us today oh well thanks
shannon it's great to be
here and i'm really happy to have this opportunity to talk with all the attendees who
are going to be here and
with the panelists too have some good discussion this morning hopefully it'll lead to
some great
outcomes for people you know learning more about you know how they can help
kids and adolescents and adults you know
really reach their full potential so i hope so too and we're going to start out with
some
poll questions um the first two poll questions that we're going to ask are anonymous
so feel free
to just answer um the third one will be for people who want more information than
we can
provide in an hour so you can fill out your your contact information in the third poll
question but
for now we want to start with a poll question it's pretty simple are you an ables user
and you know i we're going to let that roll in i don't know what the results are going to
be but i expect they're going
to be pretty high and i'm going to start all this off with kind of a fan girl question if i
can
because i'm kind of a creative person who um
you know always my ideas are a little bit bigger than what i actually produce so when
i go to concerts and such and the
singer or the band gets to the the song that everybody knows and they just stop
singing and put
the microphone out and everybody else sings the words their song i'm always
wondering what does that feel like
so dr jim i know that you don't probably have stadiums for people yelling f11 that's
11. but [Laughter] i would hope not
so many people are using this this tool that you design that you envisioned and
i'm just curious what's that feel like well it's it really does make me feel
good that people are making use of my knowledge because you know i'm just a
regular guy who fell into behavior
analysis uh early in life and found it to be very useful for you
know helping kids develop the skills that they need to learn to get the most out of life
and
so when people come up to me it's more not so much audiences i mean i appreciate
audiences when they welcome
me to the talks but what really touches me is when a parent comes up to me and
says you don't know me but
we've used your work and my kid's doing well now and i thank you for it so that's
that's really the joy that kind of hits me the deepest i'll tell you that so but it is it's nice
it's really nice to
have people acknowledge all the time and put into you know this work to try to
give some rule govern uh instructions if you will to help people uh do the best
they can to help others so it feels good yeah i could hear that in your voice too
i don't know if you guys saw the poll results but about 60 of our people who
responded to the poll are currently
using the ables yeah it looks like another 20 used to be using it and i'll take a look
and see if
they might read them better as they go forward but anyhow that's good
yeah that's good okay this pole keeps popping up i know
i'm trying to learn how to control these things all right
so where do we want to go from here well carrie i think that we usually try
to yeah i think it's my turn to see if we have a um
from here is uh if there's a book or an article that
members of the panel and dr partington kind of use to go back
with respect to like your own readings or you use as a recommendation
for other readings and and stuff like that so
uh with that shannon i'm gonna have you go first and tell me tell everyone
uh do you have an article or a book that you that you use often
yeah i do in fact i try to force it on everyone um
so i'm a fan of the classic literature and i really like the article by montrose
wolfe um and i wrote it down on my post-it note because the name is so long so
social validity
for social validity the case for subjective measurement or
how behavior analysis is finding its heart and i like the subtitle even better and um
this is a 1978 article
and it was considered a huge departure into those kinds of that kind of subject
matter and i still like to use it even though i tend to to say that there are probably
some ways of doing that without resorting to subjective measurement as much but i
still like the heart of the
article and the message that's behind it and so i use it a lot
fantastic how about you dr partington do you have a book or article that you
refer to yourself or you refer to others on a frequent basis
i do i have a book that almost everyone comes in contact with me who's taking
the courses to become a behavior analyst i ask if they've read science and human
behavior by skinner 53 and if not i said
well you need to read this book okay because skinner wrote a great book that kind of
showed us it showed the public if you will has written more for the public i think to
help prepare for the original writing of
verbal behavior which came several years later but to kind of prepare everybody it
kind of introduced the concepts of
behavior analysis as a science and it kind of gets it away from just
more methodological behaviorism and kind of sets the roots for radical behaviorism
or the main emphasis of
behaviorism as being our understanding of behavior so yeah i think science and
human behavior is a fabulous book when my son started getting into the field of
behavior analysis i said here's your
book you got to read this because a lot of people don't read original skinner work it
seems like
these days and so i like to make sure that they understand you know the foundation
of our science so that's the
book that i i recommend almost everybody fantastic how about you rick
i was gonna say he took mine [Laughter] i agree that that 1953 book
is absolutely phenomenal there's probably three books that i would recommend
that's certainly one of
them the other one i do a lot of research and i you know i teach classes on single
case design
in one book that i have taught in a seminar and i try to share with people
after they're in the field and they want to understand how we do research is um
sidman's tactics book and it is by far it just set the foundation for how we do
research and it's amazing seeing it's like a recipe almost and the
power that when when you see what sidmon did with that book and you know the
power that
has been generated it's just a remarkable text and uh that's something
i certainly recommend to people when they're in the field you know if they haven't
been in the field you know
that wouldn't be the book to send them to the 53 book would certainly be you know
skinner's book is just a treatise
and it's amazing fantastic so i actually am pivoting from anything
like super scientific i love don't shoot the dog from karen pryor
yeah you know i read it um in my undergrad eab class you know obviously
paired with um uh one of i think it was epstein's book uh
but um you know paired with something super scientific but this book
really allowed me to see how stimulus control and and reinforcement
and punishment and they have sections in here about untraining right so how this
can apply to everyday life sometimes we get a little esoteric and talking about the
principles that when we're talking about yeah but how do i get my roommate to clean
the dishes and i really hate doing
laundry so i need some sort of like contingencies over my own behavior i think this
book really helps us
like one it's written so beautifully and simply that everyone can breathe sometimes i
even give this
when my friends are expecting a baby um but
uh but it's so it's so applicable to everyday life and seeing how behavior
analysis can show up in everyday life and uh and how we can improve relationships
by not
shooting the dog right we can find better healthier strategies to improve situations in
our life
so that one's mine by karen pryor well that's a great one and i'd like to
add in one other one since we're going down that path a little bit dale carnegie how
to win friends
you know we're in a field where we're interacting with all their people all the time and
we need to make sure that we're down
at their ground level you know communicating with them in an effective way and uh
taking the perspective of other people where they're coming from so dale carnegie
how to win friends and influence people is another great book
that i read early on that influenced me very highly so great awesome
well thank you all for sharing uh that nice little icebreaker uh shannon do we have a
secret word
ready we do and it's ready
clever very clever sorry that was not planned
oh goodness our secret word is ready r-e-a-d-y and so while people are noting that
down
can we just get a little background on um abel's how how and why
it was developed oh sure um you know i've been in the field
behavior analysis now for 49 years and i started working with kids you know just 20
and uh so figure out how old i am but um one of the things that's important to me
was always about the instruction you know what are we going to teach because
early on i saw a lot of behavior
analysts who were really good at figuring out you know how to present sds and take
the responses make sure
they get reinforced you know how to teach basically but a lot of times people were
teaching the wrong skills it
seemed like it seemed like they were trying to teach things that just other people
assumed were going to be
necessary for the individual to learn well in 1991 i started a school called
stars strategic teaching and reinforcement systems and we brought in a couple of
kids
and started working with them uh using verbal behavior methodology
and one of the things that i had to face was okay so now we see what the kids are
doing and not doing but we need to kind
of have a curriculum something to kind of walk us through that made sense as to
you know what are we going to teach now what's the most important for them and
so i went to the local school districts
asked for their curriculum and they gave me all kinds of run around but basically they
didn't have any you know they said
well i've got a functional skills curriculum can i see it no okay because it's all
individualized
what ended up happening was about that same time uh my kids were under five
and so what i was doing uh was watching my kids grow up i've got two kids a son
and a daughter
and one of the things i was noticing was how fast they were acquiring skills and
which skills they were acquiring very
quickly and i was readily able to look at the kids in my school versus my kids and see
the distinct differences in
terms of what skills my kids had and the other kids didn't have and so what i started
to do was to i
took a little dictaphone at the time and i was right i was recording every little skill
that i saw that the kids
in my school didn't have that my kids had and i started just making lists of those and
then i started taking a look
at it from the verbal behavior perspective what are those expressive language type of
skills
that you know typically developing kids develop very rapidly and the kids that we
were working with you know with
autism weren't developing and so started breaking it up into the different verbal
operants also took a look at visual
performance skills imitation skills and self-help skills academic skills motor
skills started putting together lists of skills that i wanted to make sure that we taught
the children and
as a result that list kept growing and growing and growing and then started kind of
stratifying
them into skills that came before other skills you know you know the kegels call
them pivotal
skills but the notion is there are certain skills that you kind of have as prerequisites
or pivotal skills that
allow you access to other ones so the ables kind of developed that way and started
laying out the criteria you
know how can you measure not only do they have a skill but what amount of the skill
do they have and that's where i
played around with that for ages many many years with my staff and we were able to
actually you know
come up with a working model of the ables we used it internally for a while and then
we kept working on it working
not refining it until eventually uh 1998 it was released in its first round
and that was called the ables okay assessment of basic language and learning skills
however in 2008
um i revised it to the ables r uh and further refined it in 2010 but
the ables came about like i say trying to define you know what are those skills those
basic language and learning skills what are those basic skills that a typical five-year-
old child goes to kindergarten
with because when i saw my kids go to kindergarten and other kids in the
neighborhood five years of age they were
like little geniuses you know they could talk to you they could ask you questions they
could talk about what they did over
the weekend with their likes and their dislikes were you know they picked up on
social cues a little bit you know maybe
a little more when they get in there their academics were going to be worked on in
school so
after i kind of compiled this whole list i went and actually met with my son's
kindergarten teacher
and she was lovely and sat down with me for hours and we went over every
criteria for every item and i said when did the kids come into your class having
these skills and if not when do they acquire them and she said like oh this one skill
yeah most about 80 of them
have it you know in september but by october all of them have it you know and so
she was actually able to help me kind
of give some social validity if you will to this assessment and then from there we
went on and
published it and got it out there to the public so that people could start using it and
maybe those twenty percent are
the ones that use the original labels long time ago so anyhow that's that's kind of
how it
started and evolved and the need um but what i was finding was
what we really needed was a way to track skill acquisition and that's why you know
when you look at the items in each
of the repertoires um that are in the ables now they're called categories on the
webables but if you
look at each of them they're put in order from simpler to more complex and what's
nice was it give it gives a
visual display to parents and teachers so that you know they say well i really think my
child should be learning you
know about emotions and going like well that's a really high concept really difficult
concept compared to you know
you can't child can't even tell me this is a cup okay so we got to work on the simpler
skills
before we work on the more difficult skills and yes those are important ones but
how are we going to get there and so i think what the ables started doing the grid
system that i came up with
really kind of helped people to see progress over time where you could do different
assessments at different times
to watch the skills actually increase over time and to also be able to work with
parents
and educators uh because it's all written in common language it's not written in
technical
terms the only technical term in there is intraverbal because even my speech and
language pathologist colleagues they
can't tell me a better way of describing it other than talking about things in their apps
and so but other than that
it's all english so instead of saying tacting or mandating says requesting or labeling
um looking at words that are familiar with the public because i want the public to
feel secure and knowing that they can understand this that they can use this
and it's not all something that is beyond them okay because i've always felt that if
you're going to have
effective intervention you need to have the parents involved you know the parents
make a big
difference in these kids acquisition rates because you know if you just send them off
to somebody at school or to you
know a therapy clinic or having one-to-one come into the home that's one thing and
those are important to have
you know qualified teachers teach but you want to have the parents involved you
want to have them
understand what you're doing and why you're doing it and why you're not working on
certain other tasks that
other people would be pointing to uh case in point i've now got an 18 month going on
19
months i guess tomorrow a granddaughter and what do you find in kids toys and
watch kids start to interact with them well they've got colors and shapes and
numbers and letters for an 18 month old
who doesn't have a vocabulary but yet those are the types of things that you see
being introduced to kids at a very early
age and of course when you think about preparation for kids for kindergarten
a lot of parents will tell you well they need to know their numbers and letters and
shapes and colors you know otherwise
how they're going to be in kindergarten and then when you start looking at what's in
the ables which is designed to
meet that what is the typical entry-level set of skills of basic learner skills that a
typical
five-year-old child has those are just some small pieces of it because you have to
have the language
skills the verbal behavior you need they need to understand what people are saying
to them and be able to respond
appropriately whether you call it listener responding or receptive language like most
of the world does
uh but also you need to have the different verbal operands you know they need to be
able to repeat what they hear they need to be able to ask for things
label things talk about things in their absence and also be able to put together the
formal aspects of language and
syntax and grammar and kids at five years of age have mastered those skills
and at least the basic skills and so that's where the ables was created to try to get to
that level because
my hope and thought was that if you can get these kids up to that level by the
time they're six six and a half years of age you can still often get them into a regular
education program
and solos and grotner in their 2005 article they kind of confirmed that you know
years later that again that's the
same feeling they're having this if you can get them up to that level so they can
succeed in kindergarten then
they may not need special ed services for the rest of their life but even if you don't
get them up to that level the
more of those skills they have the the more their development is going to be
enhanced across their whole lifetime
so how's that for a start huh [Laughter] are we done
pivot to you know you mentioned something um regarding the accessibility
of the assessment and using plain english and stuff like that so
is your intention for the assessment um such as like who can administer it only
behavior analysts people with certain credentials or are we able to expand
uh that okay well that's a great question because i wrote it so it'd be accessible
to parents okay so if a parent can read this and they know their kid and they can
understand what i put down in words
for them to take a look at i want them to be able to use it in fact some of the parents
that i've had
have had very very little help from outside sources they just read what was in there
they read some of my books that
i've written about how to teach and on how to program and they've done very well so
no you
don't need to have a certain certificate or anything like that to do it of course you
know if you've had more practice
with it you're going to make better decisions probably in the programming end if
you've been well trained in terms
of you know how things are sequenced in terms of skills being acquired and i think
that's where
the the ables like i say it can be used by teachers parents you know professionals it's
not meant to
be the holy grail for you know behavior analysts okay i want it to be accessible
to everybody um so yeah to answer your question yeah i want
everybody to be able to use it if they're interested you know and understand it and
one of the things that i think is important too is that most
people including many behavior analysts out there these days don't have training in
typical development you know and if you haven't had a typically developing child
yourself to
watch how skills are acquired over time or you haven't really studied
developmental sequences for kids then you'll often make a lot of mistakes
in fact one of the things that i would do with people who came to work for me in my
clinic was if they didn't have a kid of their
own or they haven't been in a preschool in a while i'd have them go over to local
preschool where i had a connection
i said you need to sit there for about two hours and just watch these kids and see
how they interact
because if you don't understand typical development you're going to be in trouble
when it comes to programming so that that's
another little tip that i just wanted to throw out there for people you know go visit
your local preschool if you think
it's been a while since you've been around a typically developing kid go to a
preschool just ask to just sit and
watch and talk where the kids come up and ask you who are you are you susie's
daddy you know they are
mandy for information at a high rate okay intacting things and noticing things about
you and i think that's
where if we're going to do good programming for individuals with developmental
delays we
really need to understand where they are in terms of development in fact
if again one of the problems like i say is that you know when you look at
programming uh you really want to make
sure that you're picking the goals that are going to be appropriate for the individual
now that they're going to
start using and get reinforced by their natural usage you know from the
environmental
interactions out there okay everybody
i think that kind of ties in with a secret word number two so i'm gonna go ahead and
throw it out there because secret word number two is observe
um and i just want to kind of follow up with that a little bit in that um
when you are talking about these kind of nuances to the administration and
knowing what you need to know in order to to make those assessments we've got
tons of questions coming into the q a that
have to do with the specifics of how to administer it um
related to how much time it takes whether you're supposed to do every single
question or not if we see that if
it's sequenced can we stop if they can't do the first two do they need to do the third
so can you speak a little bit
about some time saving tips and you know expedient ways of completing the
assessment
absolutely now you have to realize most people don't know this but you know i got
my bachelor's and master's at
western michigan and i always took educational type courses too like i took the psja
course over to the school
department and they're going what are you doing here you're a behavior analyst and
so well i want to learn what pj has to say about child development you know
so i can learn they thought i was a spy or something i don't know but uh
also i took courses in assessment you know the intellectual assessment like
you know the webster intelligence scale for instance and the the piazza is a number
of different ones the lighter and
one of the things that i had to do in my courses was when you're learning an
assessment and those are standardized
type assessments as opposed to criteria and reference assessment like the ables
but one of the things you have to do is
you got to study the manuals you got to know the questions you got to know what's
in there so when you go do the
assessment you can follow the procedures well it's no different for
a criterion-based assessment like the ables are and that what you have to do
is you need to know what's in the assessment there's 544 skills in there and you
need to know what's in there so
before you start doing an assessment you got to read it you got to see what's in
there what's being looked at you know
in the imitation skills what's being looked at in receptive language skills and the
labeling skills so that when you
are starting your assessment you already know what you're looking for okay you
should know that right from the
start if you i've had too many people say well you just go ask questions in fact there
was a youtube uh
thing i saw my son sent it to me and i laughed because the guy was up there saying
he tells the parents it's going
to take hours and hours because i got to ask you 544 questions no you don't need
to do that this is an assessment this is not a test okay it's a big difference
what you have to do once you know it's in there you look at the kid for a while if you
go stand watch the kid
interacting with others you know for a half hour so you're going to see a lot of things
that you absolutely know the
kid can do and what the kid can't do so you're already starting to get your answers
just by your initial observation secondly you're going to take the process of
interviewing the parent you're going to ask them some questions now for instance
toileting one of the things i'll do parents to kind of get them interested in the ables
because i want them to be
using it too it's not for me to hold back i want them to be my partner in this so i'll go
to the toileting section
because they're saying well this looks kind of complicated i said well it's really not let
me ask you a question is your child
toilet trained and they say no okay is they ever peed in the toilet no is he ever pooped
in but no okay we're done
with the toileting section those are ten questions okay they're all zeros we know that
just from asking a couple of
questions you know we don't have to ask each specific question to get every answer
also if you see a non-verbal child for instance you're going to know that okay they
can't control their vocal musculature they're not talking using words if they're not
using sign language
uh as a independent response to be able to you know name things and ask for things
and talk about things in their absence like the intraverbals then you know that most
of those are going to be zero if
not all okay and i think also the syntax and grammar section is all going to be
zeros so what you know about the child should help you be able to fill out most of
the
assessment in a very short period of time if you know the assessment and that's the
key you need to know what's
in there what you're looking for so when you're watching the child you're going to get
most of that through
your observations and interviewing with the parents okay now are the parents always
going to give you the right information no okay but you can do some
reliability checking on that oh you said they can do it can you show me how they do
that so again you can involve them in the
process in fact i highly recommend involving them in the process i actually
met a parent at a hotel where i was working on the eiffel's assessment mike mueller
and i were
working on the eiffel's assessment upstairs in the hotel uh executive lounge right
and this
parent was in there with their kids and one of the kids was on the autism spectrum
and
at the end before we left last night i said you know you don't know what we're doing
dude he says no but you guys are
up here working all the time and say well uh have you ever heard of the abel's
because he knew that that kid
would continue and says oh yeah my therapist uses it i said oh wrong answer
because it's not the therapist that should be knowing all this is that you should be
knowing this too because
you're the part of it if you see skills that a child can develop you should be a part of
this too so
again get the parents involved if you're in a classroom you can get the instructional
assistants involved one of
the things that i often do if i don't just give certain sections of the ables to the
parents to fill out for
me in pencil so that i can go in and make changes to it if they're using the written one
is i'll give them the appendices too and in my 220 nouns and my 51st verbs that
are in many of my books they have them fill these out to tell me what the child knows
you know and the appendices for
the ables it's like body parts well do they know them receptively can they attack them
you know they can tell me
that you know because they don't know that so rather than me sitting down and
asking the child to touch their elbow or
their knee whatever let the parent tell me then i can confirm that again it's an
assessment it's not a test
so the idea here is how do you get your assessment well you get your assessment by
your own eyes and by what people are
telling you and then if there's certain things that you don't know and other people
don't know like the speech
therapist doesn't know a parent doesn't know then you go in and you do some
assessment on those
particular skills but typically you can get about 80 percent of it done just by
interview and observation if you know the child if it's a very very
if you will minimally verbal or non-verbal child you know a lot of the scores are going
to be
zero to begin with okay so you're going to hone in on those particular ships where it
gets a little trickier
is when you have a child that has a lot of skills but a lot of splinter skills in other
words they have some skills
that they're really really good at and others that they kind of started getting but
they're not really consistent with
that's going to take you a little bit longer i've walked into classrooms with teachers
who had access to the web ables
and this is this killed me because i walk in and the teacher says you know i've gotta
i'm i've got so much
work to do with these kids you know i have the kids iep next thursday so wednesday
night i've gotta i've gotta do
his iep and i said well have you gone into the web ables yet she said no no i haven't
had time for that said have you
looked at the able no i said well i'll fill it out for you it was a non-verbal child i asked
her a couple of questions
i interacted with the kid a little bit and within an hour i had her all ables figured out
and i already picked her iep
objectives and printed them out for her she said you just saved my wednesday night
and i said well yeah because
you've got these resources that are available to you you just need to learn how to use
them
so anyhow well let's go ahead and pick up the next open which is how much time is it
taking
you to do the ables because you know you just got a lot of tips there for how to bring
that time down so i'm hoping
that everything that dr jim just said will be helpful for you guys
and just a point to follow up um we had someone mention in the question so if they
are working with a learner you know
three hours a week is extremely focused case are they able to just take a section of
repertoire of the assessment that is relevant to the intervention and just do that
well that's a good question kerry what i tell people is why are you doing an
assessment in the first place you're
trying to figure out where to start with your teaching and so what i tell people is you
should
be able to you know after just observing the child for a little while doing a little bit of
assessment you should be able to start
picking some iep objectives that you can start working on today okay so every
child that i've ever come across in my clinic within the first hour i've already got some
targets picked out and
no we can actually start teaching those skills where it gets a little more difficult is
when you're dealing with insurance
companies who basically are trying to limit you know the amount of time and that
you spend and the money that they
spend on having the assessment being done and i think that's where the more you
know the abel's assessment
the faster you will become in terms of getting it done and the other part that i would
point
out is that you know we've got the webables which is an extremely useful tool for you
and once you enter that
information on it you can easily generate an iep or a program worksheet you can call
it what
you want to call it so that you're all set to go just by picking some reasonable targets
for the
moment so it saves you a lot of time and what most people don't know is there's
also
an analytics component in there where you can actually print out graphs three
different types of graphs that are
available to you you can have you know total items uh scale or the total score scale
or the percentage scale whichever
type of data you like the best it'll actually print those out it'll actually
compare the learners performance to those of typically developing peers within a
three-month
interval so in other words if you've got a 39-month old child you can choose the
39 month old typical data if you want and you can do a side-by-side comparison to
show the discrepancies between what this child is doing at 39 months versus what
typically developing children are doing uh 39 months and then you click a button to
produce a report and it'll actually put all of it into words for you you've got a word
document that's totally editable
and you can go and change it it's got the graphs in it kids name all the all the
statistics that you need to be able
to show the insurance company just gotta sign it or make some notes at the bottom
you know to include more information but
it shouldn't take that long if you know the assessment and you you know like i say
observe the child and
use other people to provide information for you i'm getting a lot of questions about
reassessment and choosing matching assessment results to goals but before i
take the poll off the screen maybe i can do it first try this time what do you think of
the data that's showing there
is that about what you would expect about the time to administer it to me it would
depend upon
a lot of factors like how complicated is the kid in terms of the skills that they have
and the other part is how well do
you know the assessment okay and again what i find is that you know if it's taking a
long time there's only
a certain uh number of situations where you run into that and i guess the main one is
is
you know do you really know what the child knows do you know the assessment well
um most kids like i say unless they've got a
tremendous amount of splinter skills it shouldn't take that long um but yeah if you're
looking at seven
to 12 hours yeah you're putting in a lot of time there i can think of very few
situations where that would be the case except there are some complicated cases
you know where you've got a kid that's
that has a lot of skills so for instance they know what the answers to some of the
questions or the situations that you're posing to them but they're not very compliant
so you have a difference
between you know do they know this skill or will they demonstrate this skill and i
think
that's where you know a lot of kids who are tricky take more time to kind of
figure that out because your first step is getting them to be motivated to participate
with you to go along with
your attempts to get them to perform the skills that they already have so
i'm seeing some other questions here that are asking about um kind of the
relationship between abel's
and the ethos and at what point would you start recommending to start including
um some some stuff from the eiffels when to include that as an assessment um and
if
there are um any other more complex uh sophisticated
assessments out there evaluating social skills or something like that that you would
recommend
okay well let's let's take the eiffels one because that's a pretty straightforward for me
other social skills yeah i'm sure
there's others out there i'm probably not aware of them uh when i did the revision of
the abel's of the ables are
at that time there was a man named gutstein who was out there promoting basically
social exchanges with with individuals as being very very important and he was right
i
mean there's a lot a lot that he had to offer there um unfortunately he was kind of
comparing it against behavior
analysis as opposed to burying them together so many of the items that were in the
added to the ablezard and the
social skills section took into account many of the the um
behaviors that he was actually observing and trying to develop so i'll say that for the
social piece
but for the aethels the ablezr has 42 items in the self-help
section as i always felt if you're going to do an assessment on a child it's not
just about verbal behavior okay there's a lot of basic language and learning skills
verbal behavior included but you
also have to take a look at academic skills because people are interested in that
teachers parents furniture set but
also you have to take a look at their motor skills as well as
their self-help skills and so that's where the self-help section enables us you
know four uh repertoires in there that we're looking at and
what the aethels is is that section on steroids okay so basically it's like how
do you take care of yourself you know basic care issues you know like dressing
eating grooming and so forth but then
also home skills skills that you need out in the community in the school
for independent living and vocational so it took that small section and blew it up
okay to look at every aspect of life
so i think in terms of the the afl's you take a look at where this
individual is now we know for instance that many of the kids we work with
are not going to make it up to the level of a typical five-year-old kindergarten ready
student okay
because there's a lot of these kids even under the best of circumstances for why
they don't reach it nobody really knows
but even under the best of circumstances with the hot shot trainers that you have
that are you know stellar performers
some kids are just not going to learn to man for information they're not going to learn
to talk about what they did over
the weekend at grand grandpa's house it's just not going to happen they're not going
to develop some of the more
advanced receptive language skills so when you start looking at that at some
point you got to take a look at when do i start shifting the focus from trying to
develop these skills
to making use of the skills that they have and teaching them more how to get along
in the environment functionally and so that's where i start watching the kids
progression on
the ables are and at some point you've seen some of these kids you know now
they're getting 8 9 10
up to 12 and you're seeing well they're still not getting these particular skills that i
just
rattled off so maybe what we should do is not stop trying to teach those so much but
rather shift the emphasis over to more functional teaching and when you do that
you don't give up necessarily on teaching the basic language and learning skills
because those are really critical
you know the basic language and learning skills are allow an individual if they can
learn all those skills they can learn
from their everyday interactions with others and that's really what we're trying to
accomplish because we don't have time to teach kid every skill they
need to learn so if we can get them learning these basic language and learning skills
then we're going to see kind of an explosion if you will in skill acquisition based on
their
interactions but if that's not happening then we got to kind of go in and say all right
we're beating our head against the wall and certainly it's not much fun for the kids if
they're not being successful
time after time after time so we need to make sure we keep them successful so we
start focusing on some simple
functional living skills and at the same time we start using
whatever language skills they have while they're participating in those and try to
teach them some more advanced perhaps
imitation skills more managing skills we can work on the basic language and
learning skills but put it as a more of
a minor emphasis while we're trying to teach the more functional skills because one
of the things i found you
know a lot of parents if you want to motivate a parent here's here's a key you know
one of the things that a parent
came into my office one day and she was so happy to show me what her 14 year old
kid was doing now functionally said you
know he can do this and he can do that and he can help him with the laundry and all
this and i said oh that's great she
said well dr partington i'll never forget when you said if he doesn't learn to do these
things
you're either going to do it for him or pay somebody to do it for him for the rest of his
life and she said that made me understand how
important it was what you were saying because i didn't want to pay for it the rest of
my life and i certainly didn't want to help him do it for the rest of
his life so we focused on the functional skills and he did extremely well so
just sharing that so i hope i kind of got the gist of your question there covered i think
sometimes though
the analysts want some more detailed kind of things so basically is there a
period of time where you may be administering the ables and the a fulls with the with
the kid at the same time
um how do you decide when to do the reassessment would you use both
instruments would you use one things
like that yeah well that's a good question and i'd say yes sometimes you do use both
or parts of both right um
the abel's r has the self-help skills and so you you've got basic eating
grooming toileting skills right there and if they can't do those simple things that are
in there then you still need to
work on that but if they've kind of mastered those items you know they can dress
themselves
and they can toilet themselves and feed themselves and so forth then you might
want to take a look more
at some of the more advanced skills that are listed you know in the eighth
assessment assessment functional living
skills so yeah i've had i do a lot of consulting with agencies
and uh some of the agencies what they start to do is as the kids get a little bit older
and the function the
focus is changing a little bit from the abel's assessment either they've mastered it all
and now we've got to do something else or they're not going to master all and we
need to do something else and then they
start switching over to the hatefuls now what i also want to point out too is that
some people say well
you know what about more advanced type of skills and of course that's where if you
look at regular education they've
got all kinds of advanced skills you know academic skills that could be worked on so
i'm not worried about the
academic section so much because if they're in an educational environment that's
going to naturally be picked up
by the you know the educators when they go home so i'm curious as someone who
does a lot of research and you know you're the creator of the system what's your
take on the research base and where
do you think it needs to move in the future wow well um thank you for asking that
rick because um people may not know i just threw it out there that i did the
i did the typical children research uh which was published
what i did was i started using the web ables and when i do my talks at conferences
i'd say hey if you're a
parent of a young child you know i made six months to about seven years and you'd
like to participate in my
study will give you a web ables account and you can track your child's development
at every three-month level
so that's what we did we created research where we were tracking we tracked 52
kids total uh some as early
as six months of age some all the way up to seven years of age at three months so
like six months nine months twelve
fifteen and so forth so i've published those data like it's my typical kids development
and that's
what's used in the webables when you want to compare child because i know every
score of the ables at what
three-month interval all kids can do at least that skill
at the 95 confidence level so those are the data that i published those are the data
that are incorporated
into the webables uh but also you need to have um the psychometric properties
of your instruments assessed and that's where a number of people have done some
we did the test retreat test retest and the internal consistency reliability
study we also uh had a woman who did her doctoral dissertation using expert panels
to
examine the content validity and integrator reliability of the abel's assessment and
they all came out very
very fine in terms of this is a reliable instrument that can be used by people you know
with confidence that it has the
right psychometric properties to it but more research absolutely has to be done right
and i think that's where we i think one of the things would be helpful is if we started
to take research about
developing kids you know kids with disabilities and taking a look at you
know their actual acquisition rates and take a look at those kids who are
not making as much progress as we had thought they might be able to make and say
well really is there something
going back to the concept of the kegels some pivotal responses that we really need
to take a look at
um for instance one of the things that i find uh most behavior analytic programs that
i've come in contact with over the last 15 years and even to this day when i see
programs
many of the kids that people are working with they give up on developing imitation
skills on a
kid way too early and then they wonder you know why isn't this kid making much
progress but when
you stop to look at how the role of imitation uh affects all of us in our social
interactions in our learning new skills we watch what other people do and how they
do it you know when they line up
when they don't light up and you know so forth we try to teach a lot of skills with
to kids with developmental disabilities and adolescents and adults but we use
imitative models for them say
do it like this but if they haven't really established a really solid imitation repertoire i
mean
really really solid like the items in the ables are then
many of the teaching methods that we're using just fail because they don't have the
skills to acquire that so i think
that would be one area of research i would love to see somebody do some more
work in i've done some initial work in
that i've got some typically developing data that my son and i actually presented in
an article
about how easy it is for a typical three-year-old to do exactly what you're doing
you know for just social reinforcement so that would be one of the areas that i
would be taking a look at well i hope we have some students out there who are
looking for those uh
research projects to get involved yeah they just fly out i mean there's so many
different ones it could be possible so we need people out there collecting data on
those things yeah doing the research
well we have our final um ceu word is going to be swimming so
s-w-i-m-m-i-n and we have one final um poll question
because many of the solutions that dr partington has thrown out there have to do
with your life could be made easier
with the web able to sew um if you would like a tour of the web april's we're going to
put that poll up
so that people can let us know that they want to be reached out for that so
um i guess any parting thoughts as we leave what do you i don't want to paint you
into a box but if you're going to make future changes to the ables or future versions
of it is there anything that
you think you would add or subtract i don't know about subtracting
i might change a couple of criterias a little bit uh like the number sequencing in the
codex you know how many numbers
in a row can i say that's probably not as critical as it seemed before but in terms of
adding some things
i think one of the things you see about typically developing children is that not only
do they have these
basic language and learning skills but also they're very quick to pick up on inferences
and
able to predict what might happen and i think that's where if you look at you know
inferencing and predicting uh
has a great role in problem solving and so if i were to take a look at some more
advanced kind of pieces to kind of put in to the ablezard that would probably be one
of the areas that i'd be looking at
is doing that because again typical kids pick up on all kinds of subtle cues as
to what's going on and i think that's where like one of the examples i saw was a great
one there's a like a line
drawing basically of a refrigerator and the cookie jar on top and then there's a little
girl with the chair and
the father like this you know in the chair and asked the kid what do you think's going
on here you know and if the kid's only able to go daddy
girl chair refrigerator cookies that's not good enough i mean the whole
implication there is that you know what's going on is that the little girl on the cookie
and daddy doesn't want her
to have it well why doesn't he want her to have it but see typical four and five-year-old
kids will
be able to explain that to you okay so i think building in some examples like that
would be a great addition to
in the future as we move along here so well we are run out of time here so i
just want to say thank you to dr partington for joining us and lending us all of these
great
tips i think we have a final slide to remind everybody who wants to see you
remember those three secret words and you're going to get an email with a link to
the webpage where you can go to
redeem your ceu but thank you to everyone for joining us today and we hope we will
see you again
on future episodes of the behavioral view can i add one final parting shot here sure
okay
as behavior analysts you represent our field my field and so i want everybody to just
remind
we do not have all the answers to life you know so i think it's very important for us to
remain humble
and work within our own area of expertise and say what we don't know if people
come across you know don't
pretend to know things that you don't know investigate tell people you don't know but
you'll investigate
the other thing that i think is really really critical for our field right now is because
many people coming out of
their training courses have been trained how to speak in a very technical language
you know using all kinds of
descriptors technical terms parents and teachers don't necessarily
need to hear you talking about those terms they need they need you to be able to talk
to them
in non-technical language that gets them to do what they need to do to have the
greatest impact
so what i always tell people one of my biggest mistakes early on was i thought
everybody needed to know the definition
of reinforcement extinction and punishment and so forth no they don't what they
need to know
what it is and how to use it and so you know if you can't describe what you're
trying to recommend to your grandmother in simple words then you got to do some
more practicing okay so practice on
granny let her kind of help you guide you in terms of can you explain what you're
trying to do because i think it
has the greatest impact for us and it also gets the greatest buy-in for the consumers
which is what we need we want
them on our site not saying i didn't understand what they were saying okay so
that's my final one thank you great words of wisdoms to end on and for
those of you whose questions we didn't get to we will be going through those and
reaching out by email thanks
everyone thanks for watching this episode of the behavioral view to get your ceu
follow the link in the
instructions below you can then go to the attendance verification quiz where you'll
enter in the secret words for you to generate
your certificate you've already done the work you may as well get the credit

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