Case Study:Tracking Dilemmas Laura and her colleagues are sitting in the library developing their first treatment plans for their clients. Although they have a pretty good idea about their client’s treatment goals, figuring out why, what and how to track remains a challenge: Laura: Ok, I’ve identified JJ’s speech goals. Now my clinic supervisor said...

Much of the assessment of client progress and clinical change comes about through behavioral observation. It could be the direct observation of the client’s response elicited during structured therapy, tracking the communicative behaviors produced during social play, recording the duration of vocalization, or making judgements about the client’s communicative performance, success and/or difficulty.  In this section,...

The direct observation of a behavioral event utilize the client’s behavior as the unit of analysis. We are interested in reporting the occurrence of a behavior so that it can be counted and compared to other behaviors, or proportion of occasions that it occurred. Event recording strategies work best for behaviors that are observationally distinct...

All behavior has a durative (i.e., time-based) component. However for many types of therapy, time may not be  important  to measure directly. Indeed, counting the the correct productions of an articulation target or the percent of appropriate responses to questions don’t involve any sort of time-based measurement. Rather, they require direct observation event recording strategies....

Individualized Rating Scales Individualized Rating Scales (IRS) can be designed to capture the distinct qualities of a client’s problem which can be used by the client and others to rate their success over time. As noted by Orme and Combs-Orme (2012), IRSs are easy to develop and can be used to identify and assess individualized...

Case Study: Intermittent Progress For the last 5 years, Sue started out her treatment program the same way as she was taught in grad school: First, use the first therapy session as baseline, then continue therapy until winter break, modifying the student’s program along the way. If the student (MJ) meets their objective, then advance...

Simple Baseline – Treatment (A|B) Graph When a particular behavior is observed and measured over time, this information is called a data series. Two appear on the above: (1) the and collected on AD’s articulation performance during a therapy task, and (2) a of her articulation performance during classroom activities. within each series are graphed...

To answer Olswang and Bain’s questions, we use to determine whether there is a notable increase or decrease in our client’s therapy performance over time, and/or whether there is a significant difference between (e.g., vs ). Our confidence in making these decisions depends, in part, on the number of data points being evaluated and the...

… Often the task of scientist-practitioners is not so much to change their methods of clinical investigation in order to conduct empirically meaningful evaluations, but merely to recognize and make explicit the scientific logic of their practical work. Hayes, Barlow & Nelson-Gray, 1999, p. 137) In this section we will deal with several useful (SCDs)...

Introduction: Does My Client’s Performance Change Over Time? Starting therapy without first taking baseline data is often misunderstood, both in terms of its utility, as well as its limitations. To its credit, a Treatment-Only approach may be justified if the client is in crisis or if the client’s condition is well understood and there isn’t...

Considerations Involving the Simple Phase-Change (A|B) Design The strategy is comprised of two phases, typically a (A) phase and a (B) phase. The baseline phase serves as a control to compare against the client’s performance when receiving intervention services. In addition, the client may be observed post-treatment to assess stability and generalization. As will be shown...

In the previous sections we used the to address relatively straightforward issues about behavior change in response to a single intervention (e.g., is my client improving?, Is he responding to the treatment regime?). The A|B Design can also be modified to address a variety of tracking and evaluation situations commonly dealt with in our day-to-day...