Tag: goal

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Podcast: Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues

On April 15, 2009, we originally published “Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Writing IEP Goals for Behavioral Issues.”

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Podcast: Behaviors that Interfere with Learning

On January 19, 2009, we originally published “Behaviors that Interfere with Learning”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “Behaviors that Interfere with Learning”.

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Podcast: Partial Parental Consent on IEPs & Assessment Plans

On January 5, 2009, we originally published “Partial Parental Consent on IEPs and Assessment Plans”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to listen to the podcast, “Partial Parental Consent on IEPs and Assessment Plans.”

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Data Sheets for IEP Goals Must be Individualized, Too

09/25/2011 – UPDATE! Instead of resorting to paper-based data tracking sheets, consider using Goalbook instead. Now in beta – sign up for your free account today at http://goalbookapp.com.

One of the most common search queries that puts people on our web site is for data sheets to use to measure a child’s progress towards his/her IEP goals. The fact that people are looking for pre-written data sheets speaks to the larger issue of anything in IEPs being canned or pre-written.

The term “IEP” stands for Individualized Education Plan. Individualized. As in, tailored to the individual. You don’t tailor an IEP by using pre-written, canned content.

That isn’t to say that you can’t use a basic skeleton of pre-written material as your starting point, but just as goals have to be tailored to the individual needs of the child, the data sheets that measure progress towards that goal must also be tailored to suit the goal. It depends on how the goal is formatted as to how the data sheet should be devised.

For example, if you had a goal that read: “When given a worksheet of 10 single digit subtraction problems per trial, [Student] will accurately calculate the correct answers with at least 80% accuracy in 4 of 5 consecutive trials within a 2-week period as measured by work samples,” then you don’t need a data sheet, per se. You’re using work samples to measure progress towards the goals.

That said, the scores on each assigned worksheet could be conveniently tracked on a single data sheet just to keep the outcomes all in one place. If the worksheets are already required of the student as part of his/her math curriculum, then presumably the grades on each will be recorded by the teacher in a grade book or a computer-based grade tracking system, as well.

But, if you have a “stranger danger” goal that reads: “Following the pre-teaching of one social story per trial, where each social story pertains to a unique situation that calls for [Student] to determine when he should say something to another person, [Student] will appropriately role play speaking or refraining from speaking to the other person as appropriate and what he should say when speaking in 4 of 5 consecutive trials within a three-week period as measured by data collection,” you’re going to have to have a data sheet.

A data sheet could include a table that has a column for the social story titles, a column for the date that each social story was presented and role played, a column indicating how many role-plays it took for the student to correctly give an appropriate response, a column indicating how many prompts were necessary for the student to correctly give an appropriate response, and a column for teacher comments. It might look like this:

Title Date # Role Plays # Prompts Comments
Stranger Wants Money for Beer 09/12/09 2 3 verbal, 1 gestural The first time through, [Student] needed prompting, but after we discussed how he might have handled the situation differently following 1st role play, he was able to complete 2nd role play w/o prompting.
Clown is Giving Out Balloons at the Mall 09/15/09 4 5 verbal [Student] had a hard time grasping that, at age 18, getting a balloon from a clown in the toddler play area at the mall is not age-appropriate. He understood what the role-play required, but he really wanted the balloon and it took 4 role-plays before he demonstrated the desired response. I’m not sure he would respond appropriately in the actual situation.

Just as goal-writing can be likened to science experiments, so can data sheets. Think about every science fair experiment you did as a kid in school. What was required? You had to delineate the steps of each experimental trial and collect data on your outcomes. This is no different. Your data sheets should collect data on what you’re trying to measure, which means you’re going to have to tailor them to each goal for which they are written.

Click here to download a podcast version of this blog article.

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Podcast: How Special Education Services are Supposed to be Selected

On December 25, 2008, we originally published “How Special Education Services are Supposed to be Selected”. Throughout this school year, KPS4Parents is recording many of our past text-only articles as podcasts so that busy parents, educators, and interested taxpayers can download them and listen to them at their convenience.

As always, feel free to comment on our content. We appreciate the input of our readers and listeners to bring you the information you seek. You can either comment below or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

Click here to download the podcast “How Special Education Services are Supposed to be Selected.”

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Assessing Problem Behaviors in Special Education Students

In previous posts, we’ve talked about what “serious behaviors are” and how they can interfere with a child’s receipt of a Free and Appropriate Public Education (“FAPE”). In today’s posting, I want to discuss how assessment of behavior can and should take place.

As with any other type of assessment in special education, the assessment of behaviors that interfere with learning must be done by a qualified professional. Specifically, the implementing regulations of the IDEA (see 34 CFR  300.304(c)(iv) and (v)) requires that assessments be administered by “trained and knowledgable personnel” and “in accordance with any instructions provided by the producers of the assessments.” This is particularly the case with standardized assessments, but you also have to bear in mind that, as a result of NCLB and its influence on the 2004 reauthorization of the IDEA, the use of scientifically research-based methodologies and practices must be used to collect relevant data and develop appropriate programming for all children, including those with handicapping conditions. (See 34 CFR  300.35 and the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (aka NCLB)  9101(37).)

Many parents have attempted to litigate the issue of what constitutes appropriate assessment, arguing for the use of Applied Behavioral Analysis (“ABA”), with mixed results. Many of these cases, however, have had to do with the pursuit of a scientifically research-based methodology proven to yield positive outcomes for children with Autism as an across-the-board instructional strategy. ABA is actually a method of analyzing behavior and applying that knowledge to whatever contexts are appropriate to the individual being served, hence the title “Applied Behavioral Analysis.”

What is known, regardless of what you call it, is that behavioral interventions are most successful when the function of the behavior is identified and addressed rather than the structure of the behavior. I can remember as a child getting into trouble for fighting with my younger sister and being told to “stop fighting” but no effort was made to actually resolve the disputes we were having. We were simply ordered to quit interacting in a displeasing manner, leaving our actual conflicts unresolved for many years. This is a perfect example of the adults in the situation addressing the structure of the behavior – what it looks like – rather than the function served by the behavior – that is, the behavior’s purpose. It’s treating the symptom rather than the disease.

For example, one of the students we have been representing is a high school student with sensory integration issues, high anxiety, and Autism. He is easily overwhelmed by noisy and busy environments and is tactile defensive, particularly once he reaches an agitated state. At that point, he will put his head down on his desk until he processes through whatever mental log-jam has occurred and is ready to return to his situation. When this happens, people need to leave him alone rather than add more stimulation to his experience so he can clear through all of the inbound data and return to a point where he is receptive to additional input. He’s gotten very good at self-regulating this way and will immediately return to his school work once he has mentally checked himself out by putting his head down on his desk for a couple of minutes or so.

This has been known for many years, now, but it seems to be the case that every so often a new person will be placed in his learning environment who disregards what is already known and thinks that he or she can somehow overcome this student’s neurology by doing things his/her own way. The last time this happened, our student had become, once again, overwhelmed by a very chaotic learning environment over which his teacher exercised poor control; he put his head down on his desk. While the aide assigned to him and the teacher left him alone, another aide in the classroom took it upon herself to go over to him and try to “speed up” his recovery process by “talking him through it.”  She didn’t understand that she was actually giving him more data to process and making it take longer for him to recover. She was actually making the experience increasingly painful to the student and when he told her to leave him alone, she made the mistake of putting her hand on his shoulder.  She intended it to be an encouraging gesture, but it was sensory overload for him at that point and his automatic response was to slug her.

There was no thought in his actions. It was a fight-or-flight response. When he realized what he had done, he was mortified. As with many people on the Autistic Spectrum, he is a very rules-based person and he has been raised by good parents who have made it clear that hitting is not appropriate. He knew what he had done was wrong and he was terribly remorseful. This put him into a psychological tailspin and the anxiety, which was already heightened in the first place, kicked into high gear. He developed somatic complaints of severe headaches and painful gastro-intestinal problems and began engaging in school refusal behaviors. His clinical psychologist found that the physical symptoms were tied to the anxiety he had about returning to that classroom and recommended home/hospital instruction until the situation could be resolved. The District arranged for a home instruction teacher to come to the house while things were worked out, which held him over academically and aided in his recovery from his emotional trauma, but he was unable to work on his socialization skills at home being away from the other students with whom his social skills work was being done prior to this event.

This is the kind of stuff that can result in a denial of a FAPE. One person who fails to take a student’s IEP seriously can undermine the entire program if he/she doesn’t respond to the behavioral issues appropriately. But the first step is identifying the function of the behaviors. What useful purpose do they serve to the student?  This information is needed not only to develop an appropriate behavior plan for a student, but also to appropriately implement it and suggest improvements to it over time.

In the example given above, the behavior in question was the student withdrawing from academic instruction. This behavior serves a useful function for the student and putting his head down on his desk was a positive replacement behavior taught to him when he was much younger at a time when his only response to over-stimulating situations was “I gotta get outta here!” and he would elope from the classroom, running across the campus as fast as he could to get away from the overwhelming situation. There were clear-cut environmental antecedents and behavioral antecedents that cued the adults in the room that he was reaching the point where he was going to need to “check out” for a couple of minutes. The consequence and, thus, the function of the elopement behavior was to permit the student to both escape from and contend with the sensory overload he experienced, as well as self-regulate. His nervous system just can’t take that much inbound data at once. It’s a manifestation of his disability.

What he needed, and what he ultimately got, was a more socially acceptable way of self-regulating in a situation like that. Essentially, he needed a socially acceptable tool that would let him go off “autopilot” and “steer the ship manually” as it were, making deliberate decisions about what to do with many pieces of incoming data, putting it all away in the proper processing centers of his mind, and clearing through the bottleneck of sensory information before returning to the academic task at hand.

That’s how behavioral assessment and intervention planning is supposed to work. From there, it’s all about training the staff on the intervention plan, implementing it in the day-to-day course of affairs, and collecting on-going data on its efficacy so that improvements and needed tweaks can be made to it as time goes on. The plan has to evolve at the same pace that the student makes progress towards the behavior goals in which the inappropriate behavior is not only extinguished, but replaced with a more appropriate coping strategy that sees the student’s evolving needs met.

Please keep your eyes open for our next posting, in which we will discuss the differences between FBAs and FAAs, and when each is meant to be used. As always, if you have any questions, please post a comment or email us at info@kps4parents.org.

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Writing Measurable Annual Goals – Part 2

In our posting, Writing Measurable Annual Goals?- Part 1, we talked about what goals are, the purpose they serve, and how they relate to present levels of performance. In today’s posting, we’re going to talk about the federal requirement that goals be measurable and how measurable goals can be written.

I cannot emphasize enough how critically important it is that goals are clearly and succinctly written in objective, quantifiable terms. In order for anything to be measurable, it must deal in absolutes and the language must mean the same thing to anyone who reads it.

First I’m going to give examples of unmeasurable goals and then I’m going to give you examples of measurable goals. I want you to contrast and compare them against each other.

Examples of Unmeasurable Goals:

[Student] will demonstrate understanding of language concepts by naming items within a given category with 80% accuracy.

Now pretend you have to implement this goal. First you’ll notice that this sentence contains two verbs: “demonstrate”  and “naming”. This is confusing. The piece that reads “will demonstrate understanding of language concepts” is superfluous and misleading. Including this language implies that something greater is going on here than that for which the language of the goal really provides.

There is another place on the goal page where the type of goal can be indicated without cluttering up the language of the goal itself. The language of the goal should describe what exact task the student is supposed to perform and nothing more.

If you eliminate this unnecessary bit to render the goal down to only what outcome the student needs to demonstrate, you’re left with “[Student] will name items within a given category with 80% accuracy.”  This is incredibly vague.

Does the student only have to do this once during the entire year that the IEP is in effect in order to have met the goal? If so, has he really mastered any new skill ? If not, how many trials must he perform at 80% accuracy in order to determine that the targeted skill has been mastered? How is the 80% calculated? How is any of this supposed to be measured? How many items must the student name within a given category? From how many categories will he have to name items? I’d also prefer to see the words “at least” immediately precede “80%” so that the student is expected to achieve “at least 80% accuracy,” which is different that saying flat-out the target is 80% and no more.

[Student] will write 15/26 letter sounds when dictated orally.

Again, this is vague. While we have some numbers in here, the goal overall is not measurable. How many trials must the student perform in order for it to be said that he mastered the targeted skill? And which 15 of the 26 letter sounds must he write? The way the goal is written, he’d only have to perform as described once during the entire year the IEP is in effect and the goal could be said to have been met. That doesn’t mean that knowledge was gained or a skill was acquired. It could be a totally random fluke.

I’d also like to see “at least” precede “15/26” for the same reasons indicated above under the previous example, along with clarification of which 15 letter sounds he’s supposed to learn. It shouldn’t include the ones he already knew when the baseline data was taken for the present levels statement.

In the classroom setting, [Student] will follow an individually designed visual schedule of his daily activities with minimal verbal prompts as measured by observation record achieving 80% accuracy.

Here, this sounds pretty okay except for the measurability. At least you have a decent idea of the spirit of the goal, but how many is “minimal”? Is the 80% accuracy meant to be averaged over the course of the year or just within the final stage of the goal? If it’s just the final stage, how long of a period of time is that? How is the 80% calculated? Is it a flat-out 80% or at least 80%?

In my many years as a special education advocate, I’ve come to realize that “achieving 80% accuracy” has become the arbitrary language that gets plugged in by default because it sounds measurable to parents, most of whom really don’t understand the measurability requirement or how it can actually be satisfied. It implies that some kind of calculation must be taking place or you wouldn’t be able to arrive at a percentage and 80% sounds like a high enough number that most parents will think the goal is reasonably ambitious.

But, when you start picking apart the language of the goal to turn it into a math word problem, you realize that there are too many unidentified variables to do any kind of calculation that can result in any kind of a percentage. Far too often, the percentage isn’t really the result of measurement; it’s a “guesstimation.”? Teaching staff will say, “Oh, I’d say he was about 75% accurate.”? There is no measurement in a situation like this at all.

To arrive at 80%, you need 4 out of 5, 8 out of 10, or 16 out of 20, etc. things done a certain way for the math to work out. This is where the number of trials and the number of presentations per trial becomes important.

When you get into reading and writing goals, this becomes even more complex. You need to specify the grade level of the passages to be read or written or use other terminology that describes the complexity of the language that the student is expected to read or write. You cannot use vague language like “at his instructional level” without identifying what the student’s instructional level is in the present levels of performance statement.

Really, that kind of language should be avoided altogether because the purpose of a goal is to move the student forward. If the goal is expecting the student to be performing at the same instructional level at the end of the goal as he was performing at the beginning, this generally means that he?isn’t actually expected?to progress.

The only real way to use this kind of language is to make sure there is also a goal in the IEP targeting the increase of the student’s instructional reading level and collecting data on progress towards that goal throughout the same annual IEP time frame so that the instructional reading level is known while any other goals that require presentation of text at the student’s instructional level can be appropriately adjusted as the year progresses.

Sometimes goals are poorly written because the school members of the IEP team really don’t know how to write them. Other times, they are deliberately keeping the language vague so that there is little that parents can actually hold them to. If the student fails to progress, it’s hard to point to the goal and say he didn’t meet it if it was vaguely written. Some school team members deliberately write weak goals so that they aren’t accountable to much.

Examples of Measurable Goals:

When presented with a worksheet containing 20 numbers, [Student] will correctly identify the place value of each number independently (tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands) in at least 4 of 5 trials over 2 consecutive weeks as measured by work samples.

This is nicely written. There is no way that two different people could pick this up and walk away with different understandings of what needs to be done.

Given a picture of interest, [Student] will be able to independently write 2 sentences (no dictation or adult prompting) using correct punctuation and capitalization in at least 3 out of 4 trials in a two week period as measured by work samples.

Again, this is really succinct clear language that describes an outcome that can be easily measured. It’s evident what the student has to do to demonstrate mastery of the targeted skill.

When given a reading passage at the end of first grade level about a topic of interest, [Student] will orally answer factual questions correctly by giving a sentence of at least 3 words in at least 3 out of 5 opportunities per trial for 4 trials within a 2 week period as measured by teacher made test.

This is a little convoluted, but you still arrive at the same place no matter how you look at it. Goal-writing isn’t meant to be Shakespeare. You could rearrange the words so they flow more smoothly, but the targeted outcome is still explained even as it is.

When you compare these last three examples against the first three, you can see the stark differences. The first three are vague and don’t really tell you what you’re supposed to do. The last three describe specific outcomes that can be measured.

The first two examples of the unmeasurable goals don’t even explain how they will be measured. The third unmeasurable goal example uses “observation record” as its method of measurement, but you have to be really careful with this.

Just like an arbitrary percentage without any indication of how it is actually supposed to be calculated is really just an estimate rather than a measurement, the term “observation” is often used as an arbitrary indication of how progress will be measured. In and of itself, “observation” isn’t any kind of measurement at all. “Observation” is simply looking at something.

An “observation record” is only as good as the kind of data it’s meant to collect and if that data isn’t described in the goal, whatever is recorded is likely to be unmeasurable.? I prefer that, instead of observation records or logs, there are data sheets and the method of measurement is indicated as “specific data collection,” but I’ll go along with “observation record” if the language of the goal is clear on what will be recorded or a copy of the observation record to be used is attached to the IEP as one of its pages, so there’s nothing left to anyone’s imagination as to what is supposed to happen.

If the goal is written in measurable terms, then the data sheets can be fairly simple check-off lists or tally sheets. Comments and anecdotal observations should supplement the data to provide context, but they shouldn’t replace the data.

We hope this makes goal writing make more sense. Please post your questions and comments. We realize this can be complicated and want to make sure you understand. As an added resource, you can visit http://www.calstat.org/iep/.

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KPS4Parents is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, tax ID 65-1195513.
All donations are tax-deductible.