Getting Started with the ABLLS Assessment in Your Classroom

If you are struggling with planning goals and assessment for your students with foundational skills, I highly recommend you check out the ABLES. The ABLES is the Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills, and this is such a valuable tool for figuring out what your kids know and what they need to learn next. I'm Sasha Long. I'm a former special education teacher and a board-certified behavior analyst, and I love sharing tools that can help you in your classroom. Now, on a personal note, this is something that I used to really struggle with in the classroom, was figuring out what my kids needed to work on. I was teaching in a junior high classroom and I had a lot of my students for multiple years. And after having them for a year or two, I was like, I don't know what to do next. The year I discovered the ABLES, you guys, it was like, it was like a light bulb. It was like, ah, I know what to do now, especially for my students with limited verbal language. This gave me so many ideas. I was like, oh my gosh, I haven't been working on non-examples. I haven't been working on negation. I haven't been working on feature and function. I hadn't even thought to work on those things with receptive language. This covered so many areas in my classroom, and it really helped me focus in on what missing skills my students had and then what I needed to do next. I was now creating goals that were functional and were appropriate for their level and things that they really needed to build communication. I loved also how the assessment tracking tool looked. I'm going to show you what that looks like in a minute because I had parents who didn't know what this was understand this, what this was necessarily, be like, oh my gosh, wow, look at all the growth they've made by this tracking tool. I mean, if we get a parent reaction like that from a chart, we're all in, right? So let's peek inside. There are two books that you get when you purchase the ABLES. You get the Scoring Instructions and IEP Development Guide and then the protocol. Now I'm going to explain the whole ABLES really based off of the data sheet. This is what really— I know this looks intense at first if you're brand new to this, but this is really what helped me fall in love with the ABLES, I got to say. So this is your skills tracking guide. Now there are 25 areas of skills, so you'll see them on the bottom here: cooperation, reinforcer effectiveness, visual performance, receptive language, motor imitation, vocal imitation, requests, labeling, intraverbals, spontaneous vocalizations, syntax and grammar, play and leisure, social interaction, group instruction, class routines, generalized responding, reading, math, writing, spelling, dressing, eating, grooming, toileting, gross motor, fine motor. It's really helpful to see how vast the skill sets are that is included. There are obviously a lot of language skills, but then there's those life skills like dressing and toileting. There's math, and then a lot of those classroom readiness things. So each of these bars represents this area of skills, and then each row represents one skill. So C11 is one skill, C14 is a different skill. D17 is a different skill. Why there's different boxes, I will explain in a minute, but that's overall what the assessment is. I want to show what a sample one looks like filled in because that's really helpful too. So here is a sample filled in, and you can see here's the date that it was filled in and the color code. When I said, you know, before that, oh, parents were like, wow, they've learned so much, is you can build off of this same tracking system. So maybe if you did this in May and you did it again in December, you would do it in December in another color. So I might be like, okay, in December I'm going to do this in green, and then I'm going to fill in all the skills that they've learned since May. So maybe now they have this skill and they have this one and this one. So you can see as you start to fill that in how a parent or any team member could be like— you're like, anything green is what they've learned in the last, you know, 9 months. They'd be like, wow, there's a lot of green, that's awesome. So anything filled in is a skill that they have mastered. So we can see from this learner they have a ton of great skills, skills in receptive language, right? Ton of great skills in motivation. Where there are these white spots, this is either a skill that is just not mastered yet at all or a skill that's partially mastered, and we'll show that for a second in the scoring guide. So D16 and 17, they received a score of 1, but they didn't qualify for a score of 2. Now what I love about this is you now have a clear path and a plan. I know exactly what I have to work on, guys. I should work on the second part of D9. I should work on the second part of B8. I should work on A14. And then you look up in the protocol what these are and you now have a plan. So let's look at the scoring. So let's look at B24. So B24, there's a possible score of 0, 1, or 2. This is dependent matching of a sequence. They explain the objective, they show how to set it up with some examples, and then the criteria. A score of 1 means they can immediately place an item on a corresponding item for at least 3 responses. A score of 2 means they can do it for 6 responses. So if you come over here to B24, we can see in this sample they didn't get it at all, but if they could do it for 3 responses, we'd color in 1 square. If they can do it for both, for 6 responses, we'd color in both squares. So that's what that looks like here. So as you go through this protocol book, you'll see all of the different skills with the potential scores, and it's all really, really straightforward, which is what I love about it. Now that you have an idea of what the ABLES looks like inside and what it's used for, now I want to share 3 big tips for giving the ABLES, because you may look at this and be like, dang, that's a lot of work. First tip is get prepared ahead of time, and the best way to do this is to go through this book and fill out what you can before you sit down with that student. Sit down with this book, copy their blank assessment tracking form, and fill things out as you go through this. There's going to be things that you know they can do. Can they imitate peers? Student will attend and imitate physical and verbal behavior of peers. Imitates multiple-step sequences. Maybe you saw them do that yesterday. Go draw that in here and fill that in. Is appropriate when near peers or siblings. There's so many things that we can fill out ahead of time. That you might already know. So fill those out ahead of time and get what you already know in here. That's the first big— the best way to get prepared. The next way to get prepared is to organize all of your materials ahead of time. So have everything that you need for what you're going to assess ready to go. Don't try to run around the classroom and find something. I gotta work on match to sample. Let me find two things. Get it all prepared ahead of time. And that brings me to strategy number 2, is do not try to do this all at one time. This is not a one-sitting situation. This is like, hey, I'm gonna pick these 5 things and I'm gonna sit down with Johnny during direct instruction and I'm gonna test those. Okay, that's gonna be the key, is embed this into your day. Do not set up everything at one time and try to do it all at once because you're not gonna get reliable information that way. Your student's not gonna be his best self, you're not gonna be your best self. This takes a while to do, so you want to just break it up into chunks and be ready to go with a few skills at a time to assess. Alright, so when giving the ABLES, we've got to be prepared, we've got to chunk it into small sections, and last, we have to use the information. There's no point in doing this assessment and then not utilizing that information to plan your goals, plan your programs, plan what you want to work on. In the big book of the ABLES, in that planning guide, there is a lot of great information on how to set goals. There's actually— what I really enjoyed were some samples of different learning profiles especially when I was a newer teacher and newer to writing IEP goals. This section was really helpful to kind of write out things that I wanted to do, and I could kind of look and be like, oh, my learner's somewhat similar to this. What do they have in the sample? There's 3 different samples in here and really great descriptions. You can even use some of this terminology and language in your own IEPs and in those descriptions of skills or goals. So use this info, look on that charting— on that chart and see what those missing skills are and then work on that. I love working on the skills with task cards. I love storing my task cards in these photo bins because you can put it in that big organizer and find them really easy. So if you have a learner that's working on this this year and maybe another one next year, you can grab this really easily. What I love about task cards is you can use them for direct instruction. We can be sitting at a table and working on this skill, but once it's mastered, then you can put it into independent work. So let's say I had a student that needs to work on C42, which is selecting community helpers. So after we would work on this in our direct instruction area, in our group area, you might notice I have different examples with different photos, and we'd work on this skill. And once it's mastered, and once I can color it in, in the ABLES, guess what? Now this is going to go in his work bin. I'm going to take— maybe this is a big deck, so I'm not going to take all of them— maybe I'll take this many. I'm going to put a dry erase marker and he can circle the answers because that's previously mastered. So even things like labeling body parts, having, you know, the kind of the next level of this. Maybe we work on what's this? This is an elbow. And then we work on the words that go along with it. So once this is mastered, we could put this version in his independent work. When we get that kind of rotation and flow going in a classroom of we work on things in direct instruction or group, we master it, and then we put it into independent work, we have this really nice flow and it's great to do that with our ABLES-based tasks. Here's one more. This is C48, Select Sets by Characteristics. This is one of the ones, remember I told you when I figured out the ABLES, I was like, "Oh, this is amazing." Skills like this, I never would have thought to work on this. Finding the round ones, finding the small cameras, finding the farm animal with feathers. I mean, they're kind of tricky, right? For your students with limited verbal language, It's so important to be challenging them with their receptive language, and the ABLES really shows you exactly what skills to do that. Thank you so much for watching. 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