Clear Instructions, Mastery, and Generalization Quiz
1. If your child does not seem to understand a lot of what you say, which instruction would probably be better for you to use?
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The correct answer is B. It’s best to try to speak to your child in language that she is most likely to understand while she is learning to understand simple language and to respond to simple instructions.
2. Which statement is most true?
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The correct answer is A. Your child is most likely to understand what she is being reinforced for if you give her the reinforcer immediately after the behavior you want to encourage. It’s better to have as short a delay as possible between her correct response and reinforcement. If you wait five minutes to deliver your reinforcement, your child will probably not understand what she is being rewarded for. Sometimes you will need 5 seconds to get the reinforcer and give it to the child but immediate reinforcement is the best.
*The next question is about the language used to describe learning trials. If you skipped that section, you can skip this question.
3. If you’re working on matching and your child matches the wrong object, you should:
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The correct answer is C. You want to remain calm when your child makes a mistake, and give him a chance to do it correctly even if a prompt was needed. You want to reward his correct behavior, even if you have to prompt it. Explaining why a child’s choice was not right will be hard for him to understand. Telling him it’s not right will also not help him understand what the correct answer is.
4. If the child ignores your request or instruction, you should
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The correct answer is D. A. is not correct because if you reinforce your child no matter what she does, she will not learn as quickly as if you save reinforcers for correct responses. B. is not correct, because getting angry is not likely to help your child learn; it will just upset her and make her unable to pay attention. C. Repeating your instruction without prompting when your child does not understand it is just likely to get her to tune you out. Also, it does not give you an opportunity to reinforce a correct response. D. is the best choice, because you can give the child as much prompting as she needs to be successful and then you can reinforce the correct response even if she needed a prompt. Hopefully, she will need less of a prompt next time.
5. If you have worked on a skill for some time and your child does not seem able to learn it, you should
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The correct answer is B. If you keep trying and trying, you and your child will get upset and frustrated, and your child may find lessons upsetting and confusing. If your child is not ready to learn something, go on to something else; you can always try it again a few weeks or months later.
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The correct answer is FALSE. Each child has his or her own attention span – that is, the time that she can sit and pay attention to a lesson. For some children, this may be as short as 30 seconds. That’s all right. Just do learning sessions for as long as your child can pay attention, so she will get used to sitting and paying attention even for a very short time. Make sure she can get a reinforcer, even if it is for doing something she likes (for example, if you tell her to ‘drink the juice’ and she takes a sip). In fact, that is a VERY GOOD thing to do. She is still learning to follow your instruction so you should praise her for doing what you asked. In that case, the juice probably also functioned as a reinforcer. Children change and learn over time, and if you have very short but enjoyable and successful learning sessions several times every day, your child will likely be able to spend more and more time sitting and paying attention to you in her learning sessions.
7. What would be a good goal for “mastery” of a skill, like correctly matching a spoon to another spoon?
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The correct answer is B, about 80% of the time. The answer is not A, 100% of the time, because no child does what is expected 100% of the time; this is just not realistic to expect. The correct answer is also not C, 50% of the time, because if there are two objects on the table (for example, a spoon and a fork) and the child matches the spoon to the spoon half the time and matches the spoon to the fork half the time, then this is just guessing. In that case, your child has not really learned the idea of matching. Even if there are three objects on the table, getting the match right only 50% of the time doesn’t demonstrate that she’s learned the skill well, although it may show that she is starting to learn it. Of course, when we say about 80% of the time, it does not have to be exactly 8 out of 10 trials; what we mean is that she can do the correct match at least 8 out of every 10 trials most of the time. So, even though she may get it right 9 out of 10 trials two or three times in a row, there may be other days when she is less able to pay good attention to you and she gets it right only 7 times out of every 10 trials. But on average, she gets it right about 8 out of every 10 practice trials.
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The correct answer is FALSE. Children do forget things even if they had learned them well. It is important to help your child to practice skills she’s mastered at least a couple of times a week to give her practice and make sure she’s not forgetting the skill. After you are sure the skill is very easy for her, and you see that she uses the skill often in the natural environment, you can stop practicing that skill in the learning sessions and focus on teaching newer skills. However, you might still check back every once in a while to be sure the skill is still solid. And you will definitely want to continue to look for opportunities to have your child practice the skill in the natural environment as often as you can.
9. Once your child has learned a new skill,
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The correct answer is A. When a child learns a skill in a particular place and with a particular adult, she may not understand how or when to do it with different people and in different places. To really understand the skill, she needs to understand how and when to do it, so it’s important to give her lots of opportunities to practice it with different people and in different places. And it’s important to keep reinforcing good use of the skill, although you won’t need to reinforce it as often as you did while she was first learning it.
10. If your child spontaneously generalizes a skill you have taught (for example, you taught her to wave bye-bye to daddy going out the door and she spontaneously waves bye-bye to sister going off to school) you should:
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The correct answer is B. You only taught her to wave bye-bye to one person and now she is waving bye-bye to another person in an appropriate situation. That’s wonderful! It means she is really starting to get the idea that waving is a way to say bye-bye, not only what she’s supposed to do when Daddy leaves the house. If her sister waves back that might be a natural reinforcer. She might also show her how happy she is that she has waved bye-bye to her by giving her a big smile and saying something like, “see you later alligator”! You could certainly model the words “bye-bye” for her and see if she can imitate you, but if she has only just started learning to wave, the important thing is to be sure and reinforce her for waving right away. Also, if speech is difficult for her and you put pressure on her to try and imitate your speech, you might risk punishing the behavior you want to encourage, namely, waving. Try to focus on the positive at every opportunity!