I recently started a job working with kids who have autism and realized that a lot of testing is actually involved! The type of therapy I do is ABA therapy which stands for Applied Behavioural Analysis. This type of therapy is focused on understanding why a behaviour takes place and how it is affected by the environment. This being said, it is really important to take data on specific behaviours and graph them and I thought it would be interesting to blog about it!

The type of therapy we do is focused on younger children and it places a lot of importance on verbal behaviour, which means that we want to get the children comfortable expressing themselves. Seeing as autism is on a spectrum, the degree of speech varies for each individual. Part of our program consists of us trying to teach these children certain words and each session we have with them we do a run through which is like an informal “test” where we graph down if they have mastered the items or not. This test is refered to as a cold probe sheet and is done at the beginning of each session. Once the child has mastered an item three times, the item is considered to be mastered and the therapist moves on to another item.

Another component of the session works on manding which is when you are trying to get the child to ask for something ie : a toy or something stimulating. During a manding session, you essentially contrive the environment so that the child has to ask for everything. The therapist has to track how many independent and dependent mands the child makes in order to graph it later on.

Finally, during the session we do what is called run throughs. During these run throughs we use errorless teaching to teach the target items. Errorless learning means that you do not leave opportunity for error in order to keep the child’s motivation high. While we do these run throughs to teach the child, we still graph down all the responses to track patterns.

Finally, it’s autism awareness month so here is a link to a promo video that we made at my work ! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_oO1VUOR8U&feature=youtu.be

Enjoy!