Everything You Need to Know About Skills Assessments with Dr. Jonathan Fernand

Maddie Duke (00:00):
Welcome back to another episode of The Boost U podcast. I am so excited to have you here today. I'm also really excited to have my, my wonderful guest here today. Someone who is a dear friend of mine Dr. Jonathan Fernand. Welcome. I'm happy to have you.
Jonathan Fernand (00:17):
Hi, Maddie. Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Maddie Duke (00:20):
Good. Could you introduce yourself to my audience?
Jonathan Fernand (00:24):
Of course. I am Jonathan Fernand. I'm currently an assistant professor at the Florida Institute of Technology, where I've been here now. This is the, my fourth year. So I've been here for a little while where I teach classes mostly at the master's and doctoral levels. I help supervise a bunch of student experiences from classroom based settings to practicum based settings, and do a variety of clinical consultation and research. My main areas are in the assessment and treatment of challenging behavior and skills for early learners and for individuals who maybe have deficits in their learning trajectories.
Maddie Duke (01:11):
Thanks.
Jonathan Fernand (01:12):
Anything else you want to know more about me?
Maddie Duke (01:14):
No, I think that's great. I'm a little surprised to not hear you talk about feeding. Has that kind of shifted? Have you shifted away from that?
Jonathan Fernand (01:27):
I mean, I do. I do a bit of feeding here and there, but as many people who do know me, know that I am kind of a generalist in a lot of ways. I don't find myself in any particular one niche. So when I think about much of the work that I do with children, children with disabilities, children with autism, down syndrome, other learning challenges you know, we are, we are assessing and treating across a variety of different areas. Feeding is, of course, a passion of mine. So is learning who and how and what to intervene in terms of restrictive and repetitive behavior as it relates to challenges in how kids function in their day to day. And you know, of course in my, my partnership with a lot of clinical facilities, school-based facilities you know, it's not just feeding that I'm working with, A lot of it is in educational attainment, what classrooms look like for those kids, those students and helping also clinicians in being better clinicians as it relates to supervision skills all sorts of things.
Jonathan Fernand (02:41):
So, yeah. It's, yeah. Not necessarily a shift, it's just depends on the audience and who I'm talking to. Depends on what I'm talking about.
Maddie Duke (02:50):
Yes. That's fair. I remember when I, or I guess I'll preface this for the listener, Jonathan was my thesis advisor, and I was applying for a grant, and it required him to join the OBM network, and I remember you were going through the list of, like, specialties, and you were like, well, I didn't know that I was like doing this or interested in this, but check, check, check, check. Yep. Yeah.
Jonathan Fernand (03:21):
Yeah. Sometimes our, I don't wanna say that our principles are ubiquitous in terms of any and every application in terms of individual clinician. Speaking of assessment, we have to assess our competencies, right? But I've had a wealth of experiences in terms of application and although I love feeding and feeding challenges with kids you know, I work in a lot of different capacities.
Maddie Duke (03:48):
Yes, definitely. Well, we are here to talk about assessment. But before we do that, we have to do our obligatory disclaimer. I don't, we didn't talk about how we want to handle this. Do you want to just individually do a disclaimer?
Jonathan Fernand (04:09):
Yes. I'm happy to provide my own disclaimer here. That namely I should say that any of the things that I say here are my own views and are not necessarily the views or points of agreement for any of the associations or organizations that I belong to I think that that should suffice.
Maddie Duke (04:34):
Awesome. Great. And to be, to give another disclaimer we are not the BACB, we are not telling you this is what the BACB says. We have the same information as you do in terms of the test content outline, and that is what we are basing our conversation on. So it is, it is informed by BACB guidance, but we are not the BACB themself. Let's talk about assessment. We are talking specifically about skills assessments today. And when I think about assessments in general, we have direct and indirect and we have descriptive assessments. But when I think about like indirect assessments, I feel like that's usually for like challenging behavior. Is there such thing as an indirect skills assessment?
Jonathan Fernand (05:44):
It's a really good question, actually. So what I like to start with, when I teach assessment as a course, I like to think about assessment broadly. And we don't have separate assessment classes for behavior that warrants increase and behavior that warrants decrease. We have one course. And so I have to teach across both of those different kind of circumstances. And so when I think about assessment broadly, I think about it as the process of gathering information, and that's how I define assessment, right? And so that really encompasses a lot of different behaviors that a clinician could be engaging in to gather that information. And it could be information for serving the clinician to, in a variety of ways but largely speaking, make decisions about skill acquisition programs or of challenging behavior. And so I kind of think about as we have this conversation, not necessarily. There are of course, assessments that are used for more or more likely to be used for, for challenging behavior purposes.
Jonathan Fernand (06:54):
But there are also assessments for skill acquisition. But the underlying reasons why we're choosing what we're choosing and the information that it's giving us is kind of a similar process. So and then like you previewed there might be indirect or direct or maybe functional analysis, if you will related assessment techniques for skill acquisition in particular. I'm assuming much of the audience is going to be aware of applications for challenging behavior. But in the area of skill acquisition, it's a less researched area and it's less talked about. But there are some really cool assessment measures and that provide you different information at different levels. And so before we get there, actually, I'm, I'm kind of indirectly getting to your question. That's okay. But before we get there, I like to think about the purpose of assessment as well.
Jonathan Fernand (07:56):
So we know that assessments are for gathering information, and that can be done in a variety of ways, but then we wanna think about for what purpose or for what ends. And so you might gather that information. I really think about skills-based assessment or assessment for challenging behavior, really having three different potential goals. So one might be to identify the extent or nature of a problem. And so to kind of preview that, like our goal might be to determine whether or not this individual has this skill or not. Cool. Right? Or it might be to what extent this challenging behavior occurs. So this is the area in which we might try to like operationally define a behavior or see under what context it may happen or not just to identify to what extent the behavior is occurring or not occurring.
Jonathan Fernand (08:52):
Another purpose might be to aid the clinician and determine next steps. So this is the beauty about functional analysis. It really determines treatments that are much more likely to be effective versus not effective, and really guides decision-making in that regard. And then the third kind of function for assessment for me, or purpose of assessment would be to serve an evaluative function, is how, how effective were we or how efficient were we with our decision-making? So a lot of -- and we'll come back to that as a lot of assessments will gather kind of pre-post measures, and that might show you, you know, that you're at least on the right track in terms of towards whatever outcomes measures you've put into place. Okay. So assessment, gathering information to identify problems, or to what extent a problem exists to determine next steps and to evaluate.
Jonathan Fernand (09:52):
Now for skills-based assessment you talked about indirect assessment. Well, there's a number of assessments. So indirect assessment, essentially we're gathering information about a behavior without necessarily directly observing that behavior occur. And so a lot of surveys, scales, checklists, all sorts of different formats might take place for gathering information indirectly. And one of the best indirect measures that I think that we have in our toolbox, although clinicians and researchers don't really talk about it very often, is clinical interviewing. Sitting down with the client themselves or their caregivers, and having a conversation about the skills that, you know, are meaningful for that particular person. And that's really where a lot of us should be starting. So when we think about layering in measures of social validity and assessing social validity, it starts there, it starts with what do the key stakeholders care about. And what do they want that behavior to look like? Is that a problem to them? If that individual's not engaging in that particular skill, is that skill meaningful, right?. So I think that that would be, for me, when I think about indirect assessment, I think about just having conversations with people.
Maddie Duke (11:22):
Yeah. And I think that makes a lot of sense. And it's probably something that we're already doing whether or not it's structured or, you know, how well we're documenting it, we're having conversations with caregivers all of the time. So I think that makes a lot of sense.
Jonathan Fernand (11:44):
Yeah, I would, when I work clinically you know, one of the questions, and that's how we frame those questions, actually, the global, like psychological literature on, on clinical interviewing is, is something I would think is really powerful. How you phrase questions, leaving questions open-ended to begin with, rather than close-ended will generate a lot more maybe valuable information. But where that clinician then takes that information really takes some competency in kind of driving how that conversation goes without imparting your own values and your own biases into what that conversation looks like. So, you know, when I first meet a caregiver and I'm gonna go into another, another possible indirect assessment here, which would be historical records, so. You know, I like to go through those, that information. And lots of different clinics will have their own paperwork that, you know, caregivers have to fill out to receive services.
Jonathan Fernand (12:45):
And those particular questions may prompt certain answers or certain information and different orders and different ways, and, you know, we should be savvy about, you know, that sort of stuff. But, so I'll kind of go through and try to get a picture of, you know, what that, what that client looks like before they come in and what types of profiles are we dealing with. And, you know, but one of the very first questions, even before I say anything else is what brings you in? And I think it's a really powerful question, right? Because that's really gonna lead me to like, what are some of their top priorities. What do they care about? And that's not me, you know, dictating what, whatever comes next. I'm not saying, you know, what types of challenging behavior do they engage in? Not yet.
Jonathan Fernand (13:35):
I may ask that later. You know, or, you know, I'm not saying, you know, is feeding a priority for you? You know, I, I'm working in a clinic where there might be a number of different priorities. Now if you're working in a more specialty clinic, that might be still clear for you. But what aspect, so if I'm working in a feeding clinic, what aspects of feeding are a problem for you? And I'm not gonna just assume or say is, you know, my first question's not gonna necessarily be is chewing a problem for you? In a yes and no format. I'm gonna let them hopefully tell me a little bit. Now, of course, as we know that indirect assessments may not always be the most reliable or valid in terms of, depending on what outcomes you want. Now, they are pretty valid in my eyes, in terms of at least getting to the values of what the caregiver or a client is seeking, right? That is, that is hopefully what they care about, especially if we're not imparting our own, you know, judgment or dictating what comes out of their mouth in terms of talking about those problems.
Maddie Duke (14:49):
Yeah. Well, I mean, to, to bring it back to your initial definition of gathering information, gathering does not mean interjecting. You know, you're just gathering, right? So should we talk about some of the specific and individual assessments?
Jonathan Fernand (15:13):
Yeah, I think that these ones that I'm thinking that you're gonna talk about a little bit here, they may come into play in a number of different steps in terms of identifying information about a problem or potential problem or skill deficit, if we will. They may help in determining next steps although many of them fall short and I'll talk about why. But also they also do very well in serving an evaluative function how well we are at our clinical services and improving various aspects of skill acquisition.
Maddie Duke (15:50):
Yes. Okay. So let's start with the VB-MAPP. Which stands for, oh, I don't remember.
Jonathan Fernand (16:01):
The Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program,
Maddie Duke (16:07):
The Verbal Behavior Milestones and Placement Program. Did I get it right?
Jonathan Fernand (16:13):
Assessment and Placement Program.
Maddie Duke (16:14):
Assessment and Placement. Okay. So let's start there. Can you tell us what this is and what kind of client this assessment is for?
Jonathan Fernand (16:24):
Sure. I think, you know, as kind of a caveat before we get there many of these are going to be criterion reference assessments. So, really they're measuring a particular individual's performance against some sort of predefined set criteria or learning objective. So many behavioral analysts like these particular assessments, because they often speak to an individual's performance, and they're not necessarily norm referenced. So I could have a whole, probably another podcast on norm reference assessments and their utility, although we just don't use them very frequently, although we may talk about one if we get to the Vineland later. But so many, the VB-MAPP, the Essentials for Living, PEAK, ABLLS, all of those are criterion referenced assessments. And so kind of understanding differences between assessments at that level is important because they give you certain types of information that may meet those three, one or if not more, of those three functions.
Jonathan Fernand (17:34):
So kind of getting back to the, the VB-MAPP, it's a very commonly used assessment, especially in EIBI settings or early intervention settings. And primarily it's an assessment tool that measures early verbal and social development in children. And so, it's oftentimes used with kids in beginning to acquire language or becoming proficient in language. So I would say probably about the age of between five and eight is kind of the cap to that. Although I always put caveats to that because you may have kids who are developing not on a normative chronological age, in terms of their developmental milestones. So that's always gonna be a caveat to some of these is understanding the goals or the skills that are being assessed within those assessments, and whether or not that makes sense for where your individual, client, student, or patient is with their development. But mainly the VB-MAPP is assessing verbal and social skills.
Maddie Duke (18:49):
Okay. Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense with it being the verbal behavior placement. Right. So, is there anything else that students should know about the VB-MAPP?
Jonathan Fernand (19:02):
Yeah, so I guess as they're learning about verbal behavior and the verbal operants, so you know, there's different kind of milestones if you will. They, I think they call it the milestones assessment. And this is where all of the skills related to manding and tacting and intraverbal related or conversation and social skills are. Of course, there's echoics, play skills are also assessed a bit in here, and some pre-academic related stuff as it relates to verbal behavior, too. So things like imitation and matching -- things like that. And then something that is a little unique although I wouldn't say completely unique, maybe in name, but maybe not necessarily in the way that things are assessed is the VB-MAPP also has a barriers assessment. So a way of looking at any sort of obstacles or difficulties that might be interfering with the child's ability to learn either those, those verbal skills or those social skills.
Maddie Duke (20:10):
Okay. Yes. I do remember that Barriers assessment now that you mentioned that is that unique for the VB-MAPP?
Jonathan Fernand (20:20):
There are other... I would say it's unique in the way I think that they're assessed, although I'm sure that there's assessments out there that I'm not necessarily familiar with that may assess in similar ways. But it's kind of its own standalone sub-assessment in that you don't necessarily, I mean, I would argue you should conduct it. But I'm sure that there are people who don't use it. Now, if you've got a child who engages in, for example, high levels of challenging behavior or might have unique learning histories that relate to stimulus control problems or side biases or motivational deficits, then that might be a particular good assessment to run. And even if you're doing another assessment, I imagine you could also just pull that Barriers Assessment to identify some of those obstacles for learning as well.
Maddie Duke (21:24):
That makes sense. Yes. Alright, so let's go on to the Essentials for Daily Living Asessment. So same questions. What is this and who is it for?
Jonathan Fernand (21:39):
So just kind of like is in name and thankfully I think a lot of behavior analysts are pretty descriptiv in naming things. So the Essentials for Living (EFL) is, I would say it's a pretty comprehensive skills based assessment. You know, it's often used for individuals with a variety of different developmental disabilities that could include autism, other learning disabilities, and so forth. But, the major focus here that I would say is different from the VB-MAPP is that it focuses on teaching functional skills that will improve. And really the focus is on quality of life in getting into kind of various settings, home, school, or community based environments. So they do focus a bit on of course communication. So verbal behavior skills are also included here. And social skills as well. But they also have a focus on daily living skills and targeting kind of things like dressing, eating, grooming and self-care tasks that are necessary for an individual to increase their independence in life.
Maddie Duke (22:55):
Mm-Hmm. Mm-Hmm.
Jonathan Fernand (22:57):
So arguably this is really all ages. But again, that caveat of you know making sure that it's appropriate for where your client's skillset is and what information this provides you that might be helpful. And giving you information about whether your client can or can't engage in that particular skill or to what extent.
Maddie Duke (23:18):
Yes. That makes sense. Let's move on to the ABLLS or the ABLLS-R. What is this assessment and who is it for?
Jonathan Fernand (23:29):
Yeah, so the ABLLS in short and I imagine most of the people will start calling these assessments by their shorthand name and forget what the lengthy one is, but the ABLLS is the assessment of basic language and learning skills. So again, this one really is I think a nice I would say mixture between the VB-MAPP and the Essentials for Living. So it's kind of a nice segue in terms of order here because... I would tend to use this as a little bit more of an advanced VB-MAPP, if you will. It's still for younger individuals or likely used for younger individuals developing language and social skills. But they get into a little bit more of the self-help and daily living skills, just like the Essentials for Living. So they do also target eating and dressing and toileting skills are also involved in the ABLLS, but they also do a little bit more in social skills and academic skills here. And academic being a little bit more than, if memory serves right, the other assessments that we've already talked about do. And they also kind of that little bit of a higher order learning in terms of generalized learning and ability to apply previously taught skills to new situations.
Maddie Duke (25:03):
Mm. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. So, this would be for a little bit more of an advanced learner.
Jonathan Fernand (25:16):
I would say not necessarily only for advanced. So you could start with the ABLLS. It definitely gives you information about some of those foundational skills that are probably on par with the VB-MAPP in terms of chronological age. But I would say it's broader, so it would go to more advanced as well.
Maddie Duke (25:35):
Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Okay. I am gonna, I'm gonna tell a little story 'cause we have time. Yeah. but when I was in my undergrad, I worked with Dr. Caleb Stanley, who was involved in the creation of our next assessment. And I didn't realize how cool that was that I got to learn from him until it was too late. I was no longer with him. But, let's talk about the PEAK assessment.
Jonathan Fernand (26:07):
Yeah. that's kind of a fun story and how like circumstantial, right? Like you don't always maybe know you're in the right place at the right time when these things are happening. Yeah. so the PEAK assessment, so Promoting the Emergence of Advanced Knowledge (or PEAK). When they talk about this assessment, they probably talk about this as like a comprehensive tool. And I would would argue it is really comprehensive. There's a lot of different modules, if you will, that go into the PEAK assessment. So kind of like the VB-MAPP, we talked about the barriers assessment as kind of like a sub-module. The PEAK assessment is comprised of multiple modules as well. And all of them I would say are pretty comprehensive and lengthy and things like that.
Jonathan Fernand (27:02):
And so this is really, as we talked about, the ABLLS kind of having some breadth in terms of greater chronological overlap. I would say the PEAK assessment has even greater. So, it's going to assess some of those foundational skills, but also go into much more complex advanced skills as well, or composite skills. The PEAK has all the same language skills including manding, tacting, receptive language or listener skills. They also get into some problem-solving abilities and advanced, abstract thinking, conceptual thinking, conditional discrimination, and categorization. And again, some of the other assessments do this as well, but I think the PEAK really goes into advanced concepts like this. Yeah, the PEAK also just has really comprehensive language development and advanced cognitive, or, what we would term maybe or globally to like caregivers and other providers as, cognitive skills, executive functioning, things like self-control, emotional regulation, and perspective taking. Those sorts of things.
Maddie Duke (28:45):
Yeah. So, I think for our listeners, if you're looking at a scenario question and they are really trying to get across the point that this is an advanced learner, they're probably looking for the PEAK assessment.
Jonathan Fernand (29:05):
Probably. Yes.
Maddie Duke (29:09):
So for our, let's, let's move on to our very last one which you had kind of alluded to being a little bit different than the others. So let's talk about the Vineland (Vineland-3).
Jonathan Fernand (29:21):
Yeah. So the Vineland is more of a what we might term a norm-referenced assessment. So the, and the primary goal of norm-referenced assessment is to really compare an individual's performance with that of a broader group or "norm" group. And so a lot of like standardized testing would be in the realm of a norm-referenced assessment. Now, where I talk about this is back to those kind of purposes for why you might be assessing behavior. Norm-referenced assessments, to me, don't really help you determine the next steps that you might take. For example, when we were talking about the VB-MAPP, that's going to tell me that individual is maybe deficient in being able to request or demand to get their wants and needs met. And you might be able to identify that with still within the Vineland, but they're gonna probably present the data in a way that is an aggregate of like overarching language ability.
Jonathan Fernand (30:33):
And then you're not gonna really know where to potentially target in language ability. You'd have to probably look at those individual items within the Vineland or use one of those criterion-based assessments that we just talked about to identify that, that skill area that you're gonna wanna work on. Okay. Okay. Now norm-referenced assessments are usually used for things like resource allocation or placement decisions. That, you know, placement decisions are sometimes linked, hopefully linked a little bit to resource allocation. But so it might be that this individual would benefit from, you know, a particular school placement because of their scores. And that's linked to these types of services or resources, and so forth. So it helps with maybe also the more of an evaluative function. So these, these are often conducted periodically to show development over time related to those resources.
Jonathan Fernand (31:45):
So, for example, many behavioral analysts working in autism services are going to be required to conduct Vinland on a periodic basis to show longitudinal gains across time with those service authorizations. So, now what is the Vineland? The Vineland really... evaluates a lot of various adaptive behavior across different domain areas like we talked about with all the others. It's just in a different way. I'll talk about that in a second. So those, those domain areas are in communication. All sorts of either language development in terms of receptive or expressive or listener speaker skills, daily living skills, social skills and motor skills. Now, the way that these are assessed though, they are assessed differently. And so when we opened up this conversation, we talked about indirect and direct measures. Vineland is done in, mostly, an indirect way.
Jonathan Fernand (32:55):
And so this is really in a checklist format. Although sometimes you could do it on pen and paper, but oftentimes there's a computerized kind of questionnaire that is sent to more often than not... It's assessed from key stakeholders like a caregiver or a teacher, where they're answering questions about the individual's ability to demonstrate certain skills rather than what all the previous ones we talked about... The VB-MAPP, the ABLLS, the PEAK assessment -- those are more of direct observation and direct assessment. So I am putting the individual into some sort of context or circumstances in which they should display a skill, and then I'm determining to what extent they do or don't.
Maddie Duke (33:48):
So Vineland, it sounds like can really be used for any client. Is that true?
Jonathan Fernand (34:00):
Yeah. It's a pretty broad broad assessment. I always think about when I am... I think there's a question on the Vineland about being able to balance a checkbook. And I remember a time in which the computerized version of the Vineland did not yet exist. I'm hopefully not dating myself to certain listeners, but and so that question would be presented you know, or at least seen, and there's a way to like now basically be able to skip questions that people may not have the prerequisites for and things like that. So you're not asking a child, you know, or a caregiver who's got a 4-year-old child whether or not their child is balancing a checkbook or not. But to talk about how kind of advanced that goes the Vineland does ask questions. I think there's questions related to like, driving and all sorts of self-care related advanced skills.
Maddie Duke (35:08):
That makes a lot of sense. Well, we are just about out of time, so is there anything that you want to kind of cover right at the end or make sure the audience knows?
Jonathan Fernand (35:24):
Yeah. I think in terms of understanding skills-based assessment, you know, you still have to come back to asking yourself, what types of information do I need to know and for what purposes? And then align your selection of the assessment. That's our behavior, right? I select a particular assessment for various reasons. And so those reasons shouldn't just be, well, "that's because that's what my clinic uses", or "that's because I'm familiar with this particular assessment". We should be selecting those assessments because of certain reasons. And those reasons being, that it tells you certain information or it guides one of those three purposes of assessment. It provides me information about a problem or skill deficit area. It provides me information that's going to inform my next steps or what to do next. And it helps me to provide information to evaluate my intervention approaches. And a lot of the ones that we talked about today are, they do relatively well identifying problem areas, things that kids are not, or individuals are not necessarily doing in terms of skills and maybe where they need to learn.
Jonathan Fernand (36:35):
And they help to evaluate. So I might intervene in some way, and then I see improvements on some of these these particular assessments that we talked about today. But where a lot of these fall short is in that second purpose, the determining our next steps. I might conduct, let's say you know, the Essentials for Living. And I might find that, you know, an individual has challenges around brushing their teeth. But it's not gonna tell me how to intervene and what are the best ways to design a skill acquisition program or intervention to teach that particular individual how to do so in a way that's efficient and effective for them. And so I'll just highlight, there's a wonderful study by Tiffany Kodak it's (Kodak & Halber, 2021), and it's a tutorial to design and use assessment-based instruction and practice, and it's published in Behavior Analysis and Practice. And what's wonderful about that particular paper is it's a tutorial. It teaches clinicians or people who are interested in reading it, the steps that you would take to design an assessment for that second purpose. How to determine your next steps or what components are gonna be effective for this individual given this particular skill that you wanna teach. Wonderful, wonderful paper.
Maddie Duke (38:12):
Yes. And I will find it and link it below so our audience can access it easily. Wonderful.
Jonathan Fernand (38:19):
And what I love about that paper is it really hits home the point that sometimes you don't have an assessment to give you the information you need, and we might need to be savvy at designing assessments for the purposes that we need to collect information to guide those decisions as well.
Maddie Duke (38:37):
Yeah, I love that. That makes a lot of sense. That you know, we have a variety of assessments, but they don't cover every scenario that requires an assessment. So being able to kind of do it yourself makes sense. Alright. Well thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure to have you and to listen to you talk about assessments. So yeah, thank you.
Jonathan Fernand (39:12):
Well, always my pleasure. And hopefully... I mean, I could talk about lots of things for lots of time, so hopefully this is just the beginning of some conversations around assessment and how to use them for your own purposes and effectively.
Maddie Duke (39:27):
Yes, yes. And to the listener, thank you so much for being here, and we will see you in our next episode.