Choosing Skills to Teach Quiz
| 1. When choosing skills to teach, be sure that you can answer “yes” to at least one of the five important guidelines. Can you remember some of those questions? |
The five questions to consider in deciding whether a skill is important to teach are:
- Is this a skill that will help the child learn other skills?
- Will learning this skill help my child to communicate her wants and needs to others?
- Will learning this skill help my child understand what others are communicating to her?
- Will learning this skill help my child to play more appropriately for her age or make it easier for her to interact with other people?
- Will learning this skill make my child more independent in caring for herself?
For example, learning to point will help the child express what she wants, will help her answer questions, and will help her interact with other people. It will also help her learn more advanced communication skills. As another example, learning to imitate will help her learn many other things, because she will be able to learn to do things by watching other people and copying them.
2. Teaching a child to request requires that you teach the child to point at something she wants, and then to make eye contact with you. Why do we usually work on pointing first?
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The right answer is A, because pointing is easier to teach. It is easier to teach because you can physically help the child the form a point and point to something, and then reward her by giving her what she pointed to. Eye contact can be a bit more challenging to teach because you can’t physically prompt the child to look at you, although you can prompt in other ways. Let’s consider the wrong answer – because eye contact happens after the point. It doesn’t really matter which order the skills happen in. If you want the child to do two things one after the other, you can teach the second thing, and then work backwards. This is called backward chaining, because you teach the skills in a chain, but start with the last one and work backward. We will see examples of this later, for example, in teaching the child to put on pants.
3. You have decided to teach requesting and you are planning to use potato chips as your reward. Why is it a good idea to give the child a small piece of a potato chip instead of a whole chip as the reinforcer for pointing to it?
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The right answer is B, to keep her from getting tired of potato chips quickly so you can keep using them as a reinforcer for a while. You don’t want her to get tired of chips, because then they won’t work as a reward. If you see that she is losing interest in the chips, that’s a good time to switch to a different reward for a while, until you think she will want the chips again.
4. If the child reaches for a chip, what should you do next?
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The right answer is C. Gently help her form a point and point to the chip, and then give it to her. This is a physical prompt, where you physically help the child do what is required, and then you reward her by giving her the chip. You wouldn’t want to keep letting her have the chip when she reaches for it, because then she will not learn how to request what she wants. You wouldn’t help her point but then not reward her with the chip, because rewarding the desired behavior is essential to learning it.
5. When you are teaching a child to request using a point paired with eye contact, why is it important to be careful NOT to ask the child if she wants the item you are holding up on every practice trial?
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The right answer is B, because she might come to depend on being asked. If you ask “do you want this?” every single time, the child might learn to point to request the treat ONLY when she’s asked that question. You want the child to know that she can come to you, get your attention, and point to something she wants – in other words, she can start the communication going and not always wait for you to start it.
| 6. True or False: A mother decides to use cookies to work on teaching her child to make requests using a point paired with eye contact. It is best to use only whole cookies that are not broken. |
The right answer is FALSE. You should break off small pieces of cookie and use each one as a reinforce on a practice trial. If you give the child a whole cookie, it will take a long time for her to eat it, and she will quickly get tired of the cookies. If that happens, they will not work as a reward and she won’t be motivated to point to them.
7. When teaching requesting with a point, you should begin fading out your physical prompt:
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The right answer is C, when you notice that she is beginning to form a point by herself. You always want to try to give just as much help as the child needs to be successful, but not more than she needs, or she will become dependent on your help when she doesn’t really need it. For some children, that might happen in less than 10 practice trials or less than 10 minutes, but for many children, it will take many more trials and more time. Just be patient.
8. Imagine that your child is getting frustrated with the learning trials, and is beginning to cry or whine and try to grab the reward you’re holding up. What is the best thing to do?
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The right answer is B, gently help her form a point and point to what she wants so that you can reinforce the pointing with the reward. If you don’t require her to point to the treat, but just quickly give her the treat while she’s reaching for it and fussing, you will be rewarding behavior that you are trying to replace with better communication. On the other hand, you don’t want her to get too upset and frustrated and start to find the learning sessions unpleasant, so you help her do the correct behavior and then reward it with the treat, and then move on.
| 9. True or False: Pointing or asking for something without making eye contact is just as good as with eye contact. |
The right answer is FALSE. Eye contact is an important skill for the child to learn. It helps her establish social contact with other people, understand what they are feeling and what they are looking at, signal that she is paying attention to them, and it’s a way to get their attention. While eye contact can be more difficult to teach than pointing or even asking, for some children, it’s important to work on it.
| 10. True or False: If your child does not point but already has the words to ask for what she wants, you don’t have to teach her to point. |
The right answer is FALSE. Pointing is still a very important communication skill that adults and children use very often. It’s a way to request, but also to point out interesting things that we want to share with each other that may be difficult to do in words. It’s a way of saying “I’m looking at something interesting right THERE.”
| Bonus Question: When we teach a skill that has several parts, we have to break it down into small steps and teach each step, one at a time. We call this “Task Analysis.” What is a good way of figuring out the steps for teaching a new skill that has several parts? |
If you said something like – do the skill yourself and pay careful attention to how you did it, and which steps you took to do it, that’s a good answer. It’s a good idea to do the skill yourself a couple of times and write down the steps in order. Then, try it again, or have someone else try, following your written step-by-step instructions and see if you have missed anything. Of course, you could also look in behavioral teaching books for more ideas about breaking new skills down into small steps, which we call Task Analysis.