Best Practices

One point Dr. Ozonoff made that I found particuluary interesting was when she talked about children that she labeled "untestable".  She described untestable children as very young children with autism who've had little or no intervention, and therefore lack the basic skills necessary to engage in most assessments.  Some of these prerequesite skills described by Ozonoff included sitting down or the ability to receive an item and then hand it back to the instructor.  She also emphasized the importance of the assessor being trained and prepared to work with this type of child.

Dr. Ozonoff provided some guidelines as to how to run an assessment with a child who could be considered "untestable".  First, she emphasized the importance of reinforcement.  Establish a work-reward pattern and reinforce any attempt by the child- whether it is correct or incorrect.  Second, use visual schedules as needed.  Third, teach "test-taking skills" under which Ozonoff listed "sitting" and "establish a give-and-take, accept and relinquish pattern".  Fourth, the assessor should test in multiple, short sessions.  And fifth, the assessor should "end on a good note, before exhaustion occurs".

I find this advice very relevant to my work because I commonly work with children who lack these basic pre-attending skills.  We would try to work on pre-academic programs with them such as visual matching, picture discrimination, or one-step instructions, but it is difficult to run these programs when the child lacks the very basic pre-attending skills necessary to be successful.  In this case, we often put the other programs on hold in order to focus on teaching these skills such as sitting and establishing a basic give-and-take pattern. 

I think the role of an FBA enters into this situation because usually when a child has difficulty performing these basic pre-attneding skills, it's sometimes because they have problematic behavior(s) that are interfering with their acquisition of these skills.  Therefore, a functional behavioral assessment would be necessary to identify potential maladaptive behaviors interfering with their success in academic programs- and even in their ability to successfully engage in assessments.