Chair: Mark L. Sundberg Presenters: Mark L. Sundberg & Lisa Hale Mike Miklos

1. The Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (The VB-MAPP): Field-Test Data from Typical Children and Children with Autism Chair: Mark L. Sundberg Presenters: Mark L. Sundberg & Lisa Hale Mike Miklos William A. Galbraith

2. The VB-MAPP: An Overview and Field-Test Data from California, Indiana, and Oregon Mark L. Sundberg, Carl T. Sundberg & Lisa Hale,

3. The Roots of a Verbal Behavior Assessment • Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior (1957) • Happy 50th Anniversary! • Jack Michael, teacher of Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior (starting in 1955) • Joseph Spradlin, applications to the developmentally disabled • “The Parsons Language Sample” (1963)

4. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

5. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

6. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

7. The Purpose of a Language Assessment

8. The Purpose of a Language Assessment • Determine the operant level of a child’s verbal (and related) skills • Compare to typical language development data • Identify language acquisition and learning “barriers” • If and where to begin intervention (placement) • Establish IEP goals • Design an individualized curriculum/intervention program • Teaching strategies (e.g., AC, DTT-NET, inclusion, in-home) • Is the intervention program working? Why or why not? • A tool to demonstrate learning, track progress, make changes, provide outcome measures

9. Behavioral Language Assessment • The verbal operant is the functional unit (form and function) • Environmental variables are viewed as the relevant sources of control for verbal responses, rather than cognitive or biological variables • Each verbal operant involves separate sources of control (independent variables), thus each must be assessed • Most verbal responses are under multiple sources of control • More complex verbal behavior is comprised of various combinations of the verbal operants • Speaker and listener as separate repertoires • Criterion-referenced assessment

10. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP • Based on Skinner’s (1957) analysis of verbal behavior • Based on typical language development milestones • By identifying milestones, as opposed to a task analysis of individual skills, the focus can be sharper, and the direction clearer • Field test data from approximately 60 typically developing children • Field test data from over 100 children with autism • The body of empirical research that provides the foundation of Behavior Analysis • Empirical research on Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior

11. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program:The VB-MAPP • There are four components of the VB-MAPP • The VB-MAPP: Skills Assessment contains 165 verbal behavior milestones across 3 developmental levels (0-18 mos., 18-30 mos., 30-48 mos.), and 16 different verbal operants and related skills • The VB-MAPP: Skills Task Analysis provides a further breakdown of the 16 different skill areas in the form of a checklist for skills tracking • The VB MAPP: Barriers Assessment examines 22 common learning and language barriers faced by children with autism • The VB-MAPP: IEP Goals provides over 200 IEP objectives directly linked to the skills and barriers assessments, and verbal behavior intervention program (Sundberg, in preparation)

12. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessmentand Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment • The assessment is designed to identify the child’s existing language and related skills • An assessment should probe a representative sample of a repertoire • Typical verbal milestones can provide the frame for the sample • Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid focusing on only minor steps • Typical verbal milestones can help to avoid targeting skills for intervention that are developmentally inappropriate • IEP goals can match the milestones, not individual skills

13. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessmentand Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment • The 16 skills assessed on the VB-MAPP include: • The elementary verbal operants (e.g., echoic, imitation, mand, tact, intraverbal) • The listener skills • Vocal output • Play and social skills • Visual perceptual skills, and matching-to-sample • Grammatical and syntactical skills • Group and classroom skills • Beginning academic skills

14. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessmentand Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment • The milestones are broken into three developmental levels • Level 1: 0-18 months • Level 2: 18-30 months • Level 3: 30-48 months • The scores for each skill are approximately balanced across each level • There are 5 items and 5 possible points for each skill area

17. VB-MAPP Level 1: Tact

33. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment • It is important to find out what a child can do (The VB-MAPP Skills Assessment), but also important to know what they can’t do, and analyze why they can’t do it • The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment is a tool that is designed to identify and score 22 different learning and language acquisition barriers • Once a specific barrier has been identified, a more detailed descriptive and/or functional analysis of that problem is required • There are many ways that a verbal repertoire or related skill can become defective, and an individualized analysis will be necessary to determine what the nature of the problem is for a specific child, and what intervention program might be appropriate

34. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment • Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers • Instructional control (Escape/avoidance) • Behavior problems • Defective mand • Defective tact • Defective motor imitation • Defective echoic (e.g., echolalia) • Defective matching-to-sample

35. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment • Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers • Defective listener repertoires (e.g., LD, LRFFC) • Defective intraverbal • Defective play and social skills • Prompt dependent, long latencies • Scrolling responses • Defective scanning skills • Failure to make conditional discriminations (CDs) • Failure to generalize

36. Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program: The VB-MAPP Barriers Assessment • Common Learning and Language Acquisition Barriers • Weak or atypical MOs • Response requirements weakens the MO • Self-stimulation • Articulation problems • Obsessive-compulsive behavior • Reinforcement dependent • Does not attend to people/materials

41. Thank You! For an electronic version of this presentation go to: www.marksundberg.com