Sasha from The Autism Helper explains why rubrics beat simple frequency counts for tracking complex skills like sharing or writing. A rubric breaks the skill into parts so you see exactly which sub-skills a child struggles with, not just a vague percentage. That specificity lets you write clearer IEP goals and know what to teach next.
Hi, this is Sasha from The Autism Helper, and in this episode of the mini video training series, we're going to talk about why you should use rubrics to collect data. So the point of taking data is to learn from it and use it. This is actually a common mistake I see with a lot of people. They collect data because they think they should, and then they don't really know what to do with the data. But the point of collecting data is to make data-based decisions and to learn from where kids are at to know what to do next. If data is overly simplistic, we're not going to be able to learn from it. So for example, let's say you're taking data on Johnny sharing with a friend, and you need— you take data 5 times throughout the day, and every day it's zero. He doesn't share with a friend. Zero times, zero times, zero times. Day after day after day, you get zero out of 5, zero out of 5, zero out of 5. Is that data helpful to you? Do you know what part of sharing Johnny is struggling with? Is Johnny just walking away when a friend asks for a toy? Is Johnny giving the toy but then taking it right back? Is Johnny kicking the kid in the, in the butt and running away? We don't know. We have no idea what level that kid is at with the skill of sharing. He might be almost there. He might be sharing his toy, giving it, but then taking it right back, or he may be at the other end where someone asks him for the toy and he screams and runs. But that data of 0 out of 5 gives us no helpful information. We don't know what to do next. We don't know what extra skill instruction that child needs. Some skills are just not appropriate to do a simple frequency count, and what I mean by that is just saying yes or no. So plus minus, did he do it plus or minus? Some skills are just too complex to have a simple plus or minus, or that minus is just not going to give us any information. Like, how do you give a simple plus or minus to having a conversation or writing a paragraph? On the other side, giving some type of arbitrary percentage is really challenging as well. A lot of us use percentage goals with our IEPs, and when you are writing your 500th IEP of the year, we tend to just throw that 80% accuracy criteria on everything. And I get it, I've been there. But 80% accuracy, first of all, is not always appropriate. If I drove my car with 80% accuracy, how successful is my life right now? Not so great, right? So we have to think about these percentage criteria that we're throwing on there. But also, how do you determine if a child is hitting that? If you say write a paragraph with 80% accuracy, what does that mean? Or having a conversation with 80% accuracy? That doesn't mean anything. So if you use a rubric, you can break down a complex skill like sharing, having a conversation, writing a narrative, you can break it down into specific sub-skills and then create rating scales and be able to identify where the child is with each of those sub-skills. So the skills that I've been talking about are complex. They include a lot of different things. Even for something that seems simple like sharing, there's a lot of different steps. So if we create a rubric, we can easily see which steps the student is missing, and then when we have that knowledge, we know what to do next. That database instruction is right there. Oh man, Johnny is struggling on giving the child a turn with his toy, so I know that that's what I need to practice with him. Or for a conversation, Sarah is struggling on commenting and making those listening verbal behaviors during a conversation. She's just shooting out questions, shooting out questions, She's not nodding her head and saying, "Oh cool," like many of us do during a conversation. That's part of the skill. She's missing that. So it's going to give us so much valuable information. We're going to know what to do next. You can really write those rubric scores into your IEPs. So instead of saying, "Johnny needs to get 80% mastery on a paragraph," you could say, "Johnny needs to hit an 8 out of 9." per attached rubric on 3 opportunities. Everyone will know what that means instead of this arbitrary 80% where does that mean that he wrote 8 of the 10 sentences correctly? Does that mean he just forgot periods on everything? Does that mean he wrote 1 sentence? I have no idea. But if there's an attached rubric that outlines the specific skills you need in a paragraph and it's a total of 9 possible points, we could all score the same paragraph, get the same score because it's objective, and see that, oh yeah, Johnny is meeting this IEP goal because he's hit an 8 out of 9 on 3 consecutive days. So then we'll all be on the same page on that. So not only is this process going to be a lot easier, but it's going to be more helpful. You're going to know exactly what instruction to provide next. So if you've been looking through your data and you're thinking, wow, this data is not helping me, it's not helping me answer the question Should I change what I'm working on? Should I move on to the next skill? Or should I carry on because we're making some progress but we're not there yet? If it doesn't answer those questions for you, then you need to look at the type of data you're collecting. And for a complex skill that has multi-skills included in it, a rubric might be appropriate and allow you to make those data-based decisions. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the mini video training series. For more episodes, head over to YouTube or theautismhelper.com.
