Episode 336 - Preschool Life Skills Three-view

Summary

Podcast Summary: ABA Inside Track – Episode 336

Episode Title: Preschool Life Skills Three-view
Date: February 25, 2026
Hosts: Robert Perry Crews, Jackie McDonald, Diana Perry Cruz

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Episode Overview

This episode marks the third in-depth discussion (“three-view”) of the Preschool Life Skills (PLS) curriculum. The hosts revisit the topic due to new research, their ongoing use of PLS in practice, and its consistent relevance in behavior analytic interventions for young children. They review three recent research articles expanding upon PLS, focusing on its application through the Response to Intervention (RTI) model, trauma-informed practices, and telehealth parent training. The tone throughout is casual, humorous, and passionate about the importance of early social skills instruction.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introduction & History of Preschool Life Skills

• What is Preschool Life Skills?
  Developed by Greg Hanley et al. (2007), PLS is a class-wide curriculum teaching pro-social and functional skills critical for kindergarten readiness: following instructions, functional communication, delay/denial tolerance, and friendship skills.
• Foundational Idea:
  PLS targets the very skills teachers rate as essential for classroom success and aligns them with the functions of common problem behaviors in early childhood settings.
• “If my child could just sit still, follow directions, and be nice, I could teach them everything else.”
  – Rob, summarizing teacher feedback (07:10)
• Why revisit?
  Post-pandemic, the importance of explicit social skill teaching is even more pronounced as children lost opportunities to naturally acquire these skills.

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[04:23 – 25:00] Article 1: Falligant & Pence (2017): PLS Using RTI with Preschoolers with Developmental Disabilities

RTI Model Breakdown:

• Tier 1: Class-wide instruction, all children get basic skills lessons (e.g., “stop, look, say yes”).
• Tier 2: Small group instruction for those who don’t meet mastery.
• Tier 3: One-on-one instruction with individualized modifications and higher reinforcement (e.g., edibles), plus role play and more intensive prompting.

Key Findings:

• Majority of children acquired most skills through Tier 1 or Tier 2; a few needed Tier 3 with modifications.
• Skill generalization to novel adults/peers was variable; friendship skills proved most difficult to generalize.
• “Some of the kids, they ditched the ‘saying okay’ when doing ‘respond to name’...it was just one more thing to do with the device that wasn’t necessary for this context.” – Rob (23:04)

Notable Insights:

• Importance of efficient movement through the tiers—don’t leave kids “floundering” at an inappropriate tier.
• Value in arranging “evocative situations” (e.g., sabotaged materials) to ensure skill application opportunities.

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[30:49 – 46:27] Article 2: Reese et al. (2024): PLS to Support Skill Development for Children with Trauma Histories

Novel Extensions:

• Targeted older children (ages 9 and 12) with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), rather than only preschoolers.
• Conducted in a clinic, one hour per week, with involvement of parents/caregivers for generalization attempts.
• Included participant social validity feedback, rare in previous studies.

Procedures & Modifications:

• Used Behavior Skills Training (BST), with an emphasis on children articulating rationales for skills.
• Focused on skills deficits identified via a caregiver questionnaire and tailored evocative situations accordingly.

Results & Reflections:

• Skills were generally acquired across 6-8 sessions, but maintenance and generalization (especially at home) were variable, with modest increases at home.
• Participants enjoyed the program but were unsure if it directly helped them manage their problems—suggesting value in increased dosage or more frequent sessions.
• “Both of the participants enjoyed the program, but both...thought that they weren’t sure whether the program helped them manage their problems, which I thought [was] interesting.” – Jackie (45:28)

Social Validity:

• Caregiver involvement appeared critical for generalization success; lack of participation led to poorer home outcomes.

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[47:01 – 60:21] Article 3: Lee et al. (2024): Parent-Delivered PLS via Telehealth

Innovations:

• Taught parents, via telehealth, to implement PLS with their preschool-aged, typically developing children.
• Integrated video modeling and weekly “tip sheets” for parent guidance.
• Used parent-submitted videos for measurement, adding a data-rich “diary” of contexts and practice settings.

Results:

• Parents’ correct implementation improved from 0-50% at baseline to 65–90% post-training.
• Children’s skill performance increased; both omission (not doing the skill) and commission (problem behavior) errors decreased.
• Diary entries showed skills practiced across varied home/community settings (mealtime, shops, birthday parties, “the garden”).

Challenges & Considerations:

• Possible parent selection bias in submitted videos; real-world error rates in unsupervised settings are unknown.
• “They might record and record until they got a good one and then sent in the good one.” – Diana (59:33)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On PLS as “Behavioral Inoculation”:
  “Preschool life skills...it always reminds me of the good behavior game. I feel like both of these are kind of like behavioral inoculation types of skill sets.” – Diana (64:43)
• Re: Generalization Difficulties:
  “The peer/friendship skills tend to be the hardest skills...I mean, sometimes I don’t look up because I actually don’t want anyone to talk to me!” – Rob (24:49)
• On Revisiting the Topic:
  “We really focused a lot more on the extensions...so hopefully...if you’ve never heard of it, you’re saying, wow, that sounds like it works in lots of settings with lots of populations. Pretty effective...” – Rob (62:20)
• Lighthearted Banter:
  Reusing “three-view” as a title, snow ice cream recipe analogies, and birthday jokes keep the episode’s tone engaging and informal.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:29] – Host intro and motivation for a third PLS episode
• [05:17] – Comprehensive intro to PLS: its rationale, history, and original research
• [14:13] – Tiered instruction explanation; group instruction strategies
• [30:49] – Article 2 review: PLS with trauma-affected, older children
• [47:01] – Article 3 review: Parent training via telehealth
• [63:18] – Reflections, dissemination, and discussion of real-life implementation attempts
• [64:28] – Related episode recommendations (“Pairings”) and thematic connections (Good Behavior Game, PBIS)

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Takeaways & Recommendations

• PLS is highly adaptable: It can be effective with:
  • Children with and without disabilities
  • Those with trauma histories
  • Older children, and in various delivery formats (classroom, clinic, telehealth)
• Generalization is still tough: Peer/friendship skills and home transfer require robust parent/caregiver involvement and likely booster sessions.
• Parent training via telehealth shows promise: BST plus video modeling is both effective and accessible but needs mechanisms to capture less-than-ideal implementation, too.
• Practical Suggestions:
  • Consider RTI-based tiered approaches for efficient group/individual instruction.
  • Actively arrange evocative situations for teaching, both in schools and at home.
  • Don’t hesitate to adapt the PLS curriculum for setting, age, or learner needs.
  • Include direct social validity measures from both caregivers and children.

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Related Episodes (as suggested by hosts)

• Preschool Life Skills Deep Dives: Ep 34, Ep 95
• Joy & the Big Four: Ep 205 (with Dr. Shayla Alai Rosales)
• The Good Behavior Game: Ep 21, Ep 237
• PBIS/Tiered Support: Ep 102
• EBD Treatment (Dual Dx): Ep 231

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Fun Pairing: Snow Ice Cream Recipe

Tied to PLS themes—requires instruction following, waiting, requesting help, and sharing. Variants:

• Classic snow + cream + sugar
• “Sugar on snow” (maple syrup on fresh snow)
  As discussed in the episode’s “pairings” segment! (67:23)

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Final Thoughts

This “three-view” affirms PLS’s status as a robust, research-backed tool for instilling foundational social and communication skills in preschoolers and beyond—even, with adaptation, in older and high-needs populations. The hosts’ real-world experiences and good humor make the how-to and why-to of PLS both practical and inspiring for behavior analysts and educators alike.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Hey everybody. Welcome to ABA Inside Track, the podcast that's like reading in your car, but safer. I'm your host, Robert Perry Crews and with me, as always, are my fabulous co hosts.

[A]

Hey everyone, it's me, Jackie McDonald's.

[C]

And it's me, Diana Perry Cruz. Hi.

[B]

Oh boy. Well, I am so excited because it is the month of February, February being my birthday month. At the end of the month, the very last day for three out of four years, I will be aging a bit. And then because this is, you know, we're coming up on our 10 year anniversary, I thought, you know what, let's super celebrate our anniversary. But by the month before we celebrate, celebrating me just a little bit. Just a little bit on the show. But what is the show that we're going to celebrate? Why, it's a podcast about behavior analysis and behavior analytic research where every week we pick a topic and discuss it at length. And like we were just saying, since it's my birthday month before our 10 year anniversary, we're going to keep the party going a little bit longer. And it was just all topics or things that I really felt like talking about. So we had, you know, our special tabletop role playing and behavior analysis episode with our special guest, Danielle Yang. That was fun. And we had a old book club which, you know what's better than a podcast that we get to do now. It's one we already did and we get to take a week off. So thanks for everyone. Which not really because we do those as an extra. So it's not really a week off so much as it's like comp time from, from a year ago. But you know, whatever, it's a, it's a little extra time to celebrate. And today we are going to be doing our last episode in February because it's also a super short month, so we don't have a ton of episodes already. And we're going to be talking about one of my very favorite topics, preschool life skills. Now wait a minute, Rob, you already talked about preschool life skills on this show before. You're right, we have. We did. For episode, I want to say 34 and episode 95, we had Dr. Einar Ingvarsan on for that one. And that's it. I think maybe it was a grab bag at some point, but we have not talked about it in like 200 plus episodes. So when I found some more recent preschool life skills articles because I, I love preschool life skills. I use it a lot. I, you know, support teachers using it in their classrooms. I, when I do surveys with teachers to talk about what are skills kindergartners need. I. I sort of replicate that article every, like, couple years just to sort of reiterate the point about how important preschool life skills versus every other academic skill that we tend to overemphasize in Western education is. Is at those ages. And when I saw there were some new articles, I said, you know what? It's my. My. My birthday shot. We're coming back and doing a three view. It's like a review, but it's the third one we've done, of preschool life skills.

[A]

Thanks for. Thanks for clarifying what that meant. Because every time I looked at the title, I'm like, I don't know what three of you is, but I'm hoping we can get that.

[C]

I also didn't know. Yeah, I think three Pete is better.

[B]

Oh, a three. Well, a three p. And if you do look at the podcast art, if you have a podcast player that does podcast art, it's Michael Jordan.

[C]

Oh, okay.

[B]

Winning the bulls with your 3 Pete.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

But unfortunately, I thought 3 Pete sounded. It's not like, oh, we've already talked about this. Whereas a three view. It's like, it's a review. But the third one of those reviews. So that's my thought process.

[A]

Thank you for that. Thanks for clarifying. I was hoping.

[B]

It's fine. You know what? Birthdays aren't about the gifts I get. They're also about the gifts I want to give to others.

[A]

Oh, wow.

[B]

Because I'm just. That's who I am.

[C]

We really blew past my birthday. Yeah.

[A]

I mean, we don't even care about your birthday.

[B]

I was like, we did. We did have a month where we just talked about your art, your research, how great your research was. But that was a long time ago. Maybe we need to do another one of those.

[C]

I spent my birthday at the Stone Soup conference. Hope you all that were there to join us.

[B]

We had a great time. So much fun. We learned a lot. So, anyway, let's talk a little preschool life skills. Diana, what are the three articles that we will be discussing? One is an oldie because I realized we never discussed it. I thought it was a good review of preschool life skills for folks who said, episode 95. Oh, that's too old. I don't want to go that far. Back in the archives. And then we have two other new articles.

[C]

Okay. Yes, they are Preschool Life Skills using the Response to Intervention Model with Preschoolers with Developmental Disabilities by Falligant and Pence. That was in Behavior Analysis. Research and practice 2017. Hi, Sasha. Also using the Preschool Life Skills program to support skill development for children with trauma histories by Reese, Seal, Huxtable and Austin. And that was in Behavior analysis and Practice 2024. And finally, an evaluation of delivery of the parent Preschool Life Skills program via Telehealth by Lee, Gunning, Lau and Holloway. And that was in Java 2024. I think I lost the year 2024. Yeah.

[B]

All right. So if you have never heard an episode about the preschool life skills or you've never heard at all about the

[C]

preschool life skills, should we do what people say? Pause right now. Go back, listen to the first two episodes. If you don't, you'll be completely lost.

[B]

I don't think that's. No, I think you will be able to pick up, pick up where we're starting.

[C]

I actually hate it when they do that.

[A]

I'm like, I'm here now. Give me a little synopsis.

[B]

I want to put as much friction and response effort in your continue.

[C]

Yeah, right.

[B]

Oh no. I clicked the delete and unsubscrib button, which was easier. No, we're going to tell you about the preschool life Skills if you've never heard of it before. I think F and pence do a great job of talking about some of the ways we could probably be using preschool life skills more because Preschool Life skills was originally developed by Greg Hanley and colleagues. I want to say like tiger. I think ing vers was on the original article and then there was a Hanley Luzinski, but It was a 2007 article by Hanley and colleagues looking at, I believe it was a Head Start program and sort of doing what I think we had Dr. Eli Rosales on talking about this one episode with the big four sort of what if we looked at the skills that teachers of young children say are the most important and guess what? They line up perfectly with, hey, what are the main functions of problem behavior that can develop in young children? And what if we kind of smush those goals together of the pro social behaviors that kindergarten teachers? And in many surveys, I have actually done these surveys with, you know, smaller sample sizes. I get pretty much the same results of teachers want kids to come to school, kindergarten specifically, being able to follow simple instructions, just generally kind of be nice to other people and be able to sort of ask for basic things and sort of tolerate not always getting their way like that's what they want. And when we think about problem behaviors, well, we want children to know how to advocate for themselves. We want them to know how to not always get what they want or to wait for. For the things that they want. And ideally, we want them to be able to tolerate the presence of other humans in their space and share resources positively.

[C]

Right?

[B]

And teachers time and again will say, and parents, I think, might say this as well. I haven't seen as many surveys about that. That man, if my child could do that, we'll handle the rest. Do you know how many teachers I've had tell me just flat out, if they could just sit still and, like, listen a little bit, follow some basic instructions and then just be nice, I'll teach them everything else they need to know. But if they come and they're like, I don't want to sit. Give me what I want now, I won't wait, or I'm just going to grab and take what I want from other people. They're like, I can't teach those kids. Those are. Those are the kids that I think we have a lot of challenge with. I think post pandemic as well, kids were not around other kids. They were not necessarily in educational environments. And I think we lost a lot of that with our kids. Just the ability to ask, politely, wait for, you know, 30 seconds to a minute and share. That was a skill that got lost for, I don't want to say a generation, but like four to five years of kids, and you could tell. And those kids are probably going to be struggling for a long period of their educational careers because they spent so much time relearning some of these basic skills. So in any case, what it comes down to is if you had a way to just consistently ensure that all children learned these skills, wouldn't our schools be a better place, not just for appliance reasons, not just to get kids to do what you want, but just in kids being able to access what they need more quickly. We see this back in Walden, too. So I love preschool life skills as just a kind of a nice, equitable way to ensure that everyone learns that. Like, rather than just let's assume kids know that and then be mad when they don't, and then eventually come up with some sort of elaborate individualized behavior plan where we do, you know, basic functional communication and delay and denial training. What if we just made sure everyone has that skill from as early an age as possible? In this case, it's mostly kids three to five. That's why it's preschool life skills. And I love that idea. I think we all are huge fans of what if we just did this and everyone could do it. And then we could move on from there. You know, getting fluency with these basic skills, more repetition. So that's where the preschool life skills came from. There's sort of four general areas which again, if you have any practice in functional communication or delay and denial training, you're going to say, I get this, this doesn't sound that complicated because it's not. But it's basically ideas around instruction following functional communication, tolerance to. Tolerance to any sort of denial and friendship skills. Friendship skills being specifically, you know, greeting people and sharing, you know, offering to share things. When people come into a play space where you have materials saying thank you or be kind of the main skills, the instruction following is like one, two step instructions. It's responding. Yes. And looking at someone. When they say your name, we don't mean eye contact, looking, just stopping what you're doing, and generally looking in the direction of where the instruction is coming from. All of these things. You can read lots of research articles about how important it is for things like, hey, asking for help, asking for attention. Right. Waiting up to 30 seconds for someone to give you attention. Waiting up to 30 seconds for someone to give you an item. These are all things like, I do that all the time. Where do you do that? Probably in your tier 3 intensive behavior plans with young children. So what if we just assume we're going to have to write those behavior plans anyway and let's just jump ahead of it and kind of make that a general guideline. So the original studies were with children in Head Start programs. So typically developing children, and then a lot of extensions, specifically the Fallagant and Pence we're going to talk about now, looked at what is the response to intervention model? So if you've never worked in a public school or you've never worked in an educational setting where they use a response to intervention model, basically it just says, what if we set up a system in which everybody received some type of intervention? That's the tier one. So the least restrictive intervention. This is a concept that comes up a lot in at least American public schools. Least restrictive setting. Least restrictive, restrictive procedure. You know, it's in ethical codes too. We don't want to start with the hardest thing ever. If we don't have to, then from there you can move on to your tier two and tier three, which is sort of just increasing the dosage, the intensity of the programming. It could be that we teach the skill with more reinforcement, kind of external reinforcement, or we teach it in a smaller group, or we teach it with More repetition, or we have multiple exemplars, right? Or we write an individualized behavior plan that ties into the teaching of these skills, again with more reinforcement, probably with more exemplars, probably more in a one to one setting. And again, those are the tiers from tier one to tier three. And the real extension here is the idea of it's not great if we only teach typically developing kids these skills, because we know that many of the children that we support as behavior analysts have disabilities that make learning some of these skills a little bit harder for a variety of reasons. So we need to ensure that this is a technology that can be replicated and generalized for as many children as possible. Because there has to be a cost effective savings for a program like this to be of use in classrooms. If it's something that only works for the kids that, like some of them, probably will just develop these skills naturally on their own, a few might not. It's not going to be seen as a good use of instructional time because as much as teachers will tell you, my number one goal is for children to be able to wait a little bit, follow simple instructions. The states in most of our, in most, at least United States will tell you they need to be able to be writing these essays and doing all these passages and doing all this busy work. And if they can't do it, we really don't care how much they followed instructions, because that's how education works. A lot of time we want a product and we will assume all these other things are in place. And if they're not, we don't care. We still need this product. So make it happen. Which is stressful for teachers, that's a different episode. So in Fallagon and Pence, what we have here, I'm not going to go through their introduction because I kind of did already with sort of a big review of many of the other articles that we discussed. But basically here, this was sort of a look at that more elaborate use of preschool life skills, like how do we teach across the tiers? So tier one preschool life skills is basically going to look like teaching the individual skills. Like, you know, say yes and stop what you're doing and look at the person giving an instruction. When you hear your name, follow a one step instruction, follow a two step instruction. And basically tier one just means it's happening for a whole class. So you take your whole group of learners and you do a little mini lesson. And I've written like so many of these mini lessons in the past. I have one. I'VE been trying to use Canva because everyone seems to love Canva. It's so pretty. So this year I redid all my old lessons and I did them in Canva with little like pictures of kids and stuff. Social validity off the charts. The classroom I have run this. I'm just going to brag, you know, it's my birthday. They I have been told by the teacher, the kids keep asking, when are you going to come in and do another lesson? They really think of you as a teacher in the classroom, which I don't get all the time. As someone who mostly comes in to be like, here's the individualized behavior plan or I'm just consulting to the teacher and I'm just trying to be nice to the kids, but I don't work with them directly. So it's been a real, it's always a real treat to do preschool life skills because the kids tend to like you a lot when you do them. They think it's very funny when you run this program because at least the first levels are super easy and you know, you do a little mini lesson and you sort of demonstrate what it looks like. Some folks have added like this is what it should look like. And you know, again, depending on your class, some kids think that's hilarious. Sometimes it can be confusing to teach non examples. So that varies. That's not in a lot of the research.

[C]

Do you wear your bow tie when you do this?

[B]

Sometimes I do it depends.

[A]

I bet you do.

[B]

Depends on the mood I'm in. And then you sort of just, here's what it looks like. So I say your name, you look, stop what you're doing, look up, say yes, here, I'll do it. Or you have the teacher do it and they think that's funny. When the teacher's learning a lesson and then you try to engage with all of the students, give every student a chance to practice. Now, I don't know if this is necessarily always needed. A lot of times in my tier one lessons, I'll only pull a few students depending on the complexity of the lesson. So, for example, stop, look up, say yes, everybody can do that. You can get that done in less than a minute. But with young children, especially when you have children who might have difficulty sitting for periods of time, some of the longer things like let's all do one step instructions or two step instructions or let's wait 330 seconds for attend, you're not going to run that with every single child, so you might only do it with a few. So Very.

[C]

Can you do it in a group

[B]

instruction model or this is group instruction tier one. Everyone is learning this so they can't

[C]

they all wait for 30 seconds at the same time?

[B]

Oh, oh, you mean could you do that trial? It's like, let's all wait for this. Oh, you potentially could do that. Yeah.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's, there's lots of, of, of tweaks that you could certainly do to this at, at tier one. But the big goal is everyone sees it, ideally everyone tries it once and then the in situ practice you set up either set up opportunities or at least in the case of falling pence, you hope they happen and you sort of set a guideline of if it doesn't happen at this point, we're just going to make it happen because you only have so much time in a day and you set up the situations in which these skills would need to occur and the student does or does not engage in the skill Tier one. Usually if they do engage in the skill, you just sort of say thanks for doing that and you allow for the natural, you know, consequence to occur. So if they're asking for something, you give them the item. If they're waiting 30 seconds before getting something, after 30 seconds, you give them the item or you give them your attention. Right. If they give a friend the item, when they join you say, hey, that was great friendship or what a good friend you are. Right. You give them some behavior specific praise. If they make a mistake, you give corrective feedback. Depending on the program at tier one, you either give them the feedback and have them practice again. I always like having the kids practice again because it then gives you a chance to give them like, you know, maybe more muted praise, but they still, you know, receive the natural consequence of the attention or whatever it is. So that's kind of a tier one and then tier two. What you're going to see in this study is breaking those skills further down. Now, in the Fallagon Pence article, they were working with clients who preschool children with autism and, or developmental, and or developmental delay. And they used the tiers based on some sort of failure to meet a performance criterion that they set for acquisition. They only looked at five skills and they did focus a lot on generalization because typically in the preschool life skills, like the early studies, they see generalization in the sense of the skills occur in the actual environment where they're supposed to occur. But that's not necessarily going to be the case when you're looking at tier two or tier three. Instruction, because that's where your instruction tends to look a little bit more like discrete trial instruction, where you're like, we're in a cubby doing this. Which, as we all know, can lead to, wow, great job. Learning the skill only in the context of a cubby or a place with four walls, like, around you. Otherwise your skills aren't as good. So they only looked at five of the preschool life skills. They looked at the respond appropriately to name. They looked at requesting adult assistance or requesting adult attention. And they looked at delay tolerance, which is saying okay and waiting 30 seconds, and then denial tolerance, which again, same thing. Okay, and then not getting whatever it is you asked for for, in this case, 60 seconds. They looked at whether kids engaged in problem behavior as well, and whether the responses were prompted or independence. And then they did these generalization probes. So let's run the skill in, you know, a time we weren't. We weren't practicing. And again, they set it up so that either happened. And if it didn't happen after a set period of time in the day, they'd set up opportunities. I'm a huge fan of these setup opportunities because especially if you are a kindergarten teacher and you're running this maybe with, like, a classroom, Aiden, you would need to be able to do this relatively efficiently. I haven't actually asked teachers. It might be a good thing to look at. Do teachers prefer to just sort of see when things happen or prefer to just have it happen? Because they're planning for it in this hour span, and I think it's going to vary from teacher to teacher. But that would be something to know if you're consulting, if you like preschool life skills and you want to work with a teacher to. To run this, because it does get a little hard to set these things up because you have to then have an opportunity for all of the students to engage. Well, you know, this year, the teacher I'm working with preferred to just have it right after the lesson, we go do an activity. I think in. In our case, it was usually like a writing activity or a phonics type activity. And within that, we would sabotage little things. So, like, whoops, some of the markers aren't there, or whoops, some of the erasers aren't there. Right. And then we'd have to tell them, oh, go get the whatever and the whatever, because we're doing two step instructions in that. In that situation. All right.

[A]

In any case that you were sabotaging things, you're like, I love it.

[B]

I think teachers like it Too. It's like a little fun of like both. I am teach a new skill in a real situation and I'm going to make sure these things I'm going to sabotage. Like, I don't want everything to be too easy for these kids. These, these snowflakes today, man, you gotta, gotta have some sabotage and functional communication. So again, you know, they had their baseline where they'd sort of, you know, this happens in preschool life skills too, where you're sort of just hey, I wonder who can already do this skill again at tier one, you may decide let's not bother with baseline because I think if you're trying to run this in a classroom, the idea of let's see where kids are, you know, you know, not every kid's going to be able to engage in the skill. So you may or may not. You may just want to say, let's assume no one can do this and just start teaching and be happy when everyone masters the skill in one day. Right. You start with successes there. Sometimes that's good. Teachers like to see that. Whereas if you make them do a lot of data collection to demonstrate how kids don't know things, they're like, that was a huge waste of my time. I could have told you they didn't know these things. I asked you here consultant, so you got to be careful there. So their tier one in this study was similar to what I, you know, had described. Sort of what it typically looks like when I've run this. In classrooms where you have groups of six, you have a group of children, in this case six children. They had the rationale they modeled. With only six children, every student was able to practice. They used descriptive praise and brief physical attention. They could use at least most prompting, usually a vocal model to a full prompt if the student made a mistake. And then they taught one of the five each day. And it was about a 10 minute session, which seems a little long to me. But you know, I'm pretty fast when I run these lessons.

[A]

Toot your own horn right there.

[B]

I'm real fast, I'm real good at this.

[A]

Ten minutes is like, wow, what are you even doing with your time?

[B]

Maybe it's me and my AI canva, you know, presentation. I guess the training sessions, they'd either arrange the antecedent situation and then again contingent praise and physical tension. And the skill specific reinforcer if they were correct, error or any sort of problem behavior. They use least to most prompting as described. And they give kind of neutral praise and a natural reinforcer typically like the Original studies, they sort of do two probes per kid. In this case, they did five training sessions to look at mastery. Either they were engaging in at least 85% of those five had a correct response independently across two different sessions of those five, or they didn't. If they didn't have mastery, they went to tier two. Tier two was pretty much the same as tier one, except they did a small group instruction of only three children, same teaching procedures. Otherwise they did a practice trial after errors were made. So again, more opportunities for that feedback and practice. Practice.

[C]

If again they planned ahead that it was going to be three in the group or is that just how many students needed the tier two intervention?

[B]

Some of, I mean it varied from skill. I mean as you'll see it varied from skill to skill, which student learned what, where. So I think it was more just let's do it in a smaller group so we can have more opportunities to practice. And then if they still and behold, if they still were demonstrating the skill at mastery, they go to tier three, which was one on one instruction. And it in this tier they also added a role play and a highly preferred edible for correct responses. So again, more reinforcement, more opportunities to practice. And if they had, if there was an error or problem behavior, they used physical guidance or you know, full, full vertical model, vocal model, depending on the skill. And they would do the error correction procedure three times after a mistake. So again, more opportunities to practice the skill after one to one sessions. They do these training sessions and use most Elise prompting with an embedded prompt delay. So again, they weren't allowing the children to make mistakes. So they did kind of errorless learning after the fact.

[C]

This is a good example, I think of moving from least restrictive to most restrictive teaching process because they've really reserved the, the heavy hitters for the tier three. Which one, which way did the tiers go? Tier one is less restrictive. Yeah, yeah. So they've reserved like the extra reinforcers, the edible reinforcers, the most elite prompting, the physical reinforcement for the tier three for learners who have demonstrated they didn't learn in the less restrictive settings. I really like this as a model for that as well because sometimes we forget that more restrictive also includes like the prompting hierarchy as we approach it. So yeah, it's good representation.

[B]

Even at tier three they did have to make some individual modifications, which again is part of tier three. It's part of tier three.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So for example, some of the kids, they ditched the saying okay when doing respond to name again a variety of reasons. I think some of the kids were using assistive technology devices. So it was kind of like one more thing to have to respond to with the device that I don't maybe not necessarily useful in that, you know, for that context. For some other students, they changed some of the sign language they were having the students use to actually using their assistive tech device. There was a touch, excuse me, icon they added. For a number of students, they. For one of the participants, they changed the delay tolerance to add another preferred edible. After, you know, kind of accepting, not getting their way and saying okay. They had a textual prompt of okay. For one student that was really, really big. They did additional training with a novel therapist to support generalization. One student did actually have an okay on their proloquo, you know, enabled device. So we get lots of little modifications, which is what Tier 3 is all about. It's like, what do we still need to ensure we're giving effective instruction to the children? So what were the results, which is going to be important here?

[C]

It didn't work at all?

[B]

No, it didn't work. So 6 of 6 of the participants were able to meet criteria year for all five skills. I think one dropped out. So it's one of those, like, not everyone made it, but not everyone got every skill. But it wasn't necessarily due to the failure of the intervention. One of them, there was one. For only four out of five student participants, one was one discontinued. Again, like I said, after mastering two skills, four participants increased in at least one one of their skills with adults in those post mastery probes. So again, generalization still wasn't as good as they wanted in this case. The peer friendship skills tend to be the hardest skills and I've seen that pretty consistently since I've used preschool life skills. It can be, it can be a bit challenging. I think there's just a lot of things to be paying attention to, like

[A]

a lot of variables.

[C]

Right.

[B]

You know, you have to stop what you're doing to look up at someone when you're already playing, but they haven't said your name necessarily. So it's a lot of extra things you need to be attending to. That I think can be hard. For children, young children, children with disabilities, those can be adult skills. Adult. I mean, I want to look up from what I'm doing. I mean, sometimes I don't look up because I actually don't want anyone to talk to me. I'm like, no, I'm looking hard as I can at what I am doing in the hopes that I signal, do not talk to Me, I will not share my resources with you. Only two participants really just did not have any generalization whatsoever. So any skills with peers or other adults of post mastery. But, you know, everyone else had at least some skills that they were doing some amount of generalization, so again, could get better if they keep practicing these skills. The patterns, again, varied across the participants. Like three of them actually require acquired almost all the skills at Tier one. One needed Tier two to do requesting assistance, practice, and respond to name, you know, but it was different. Some needed tier 2 for respond to name. Some needed it for gain attention. Some needed it for delay and denial. Right. Two needed tier three with modifications, and that was all tier three for mastery to reach. So again, it did seem like they broadly summarize it as some of the students really got everything mastered all the skills, at least in terms of in the context of training, not necessarily generalization at Tier 1 and 2. And some needed full Tier 3 instruction. And this is going to be important to know as, you know, we look at trying to expand the use of preschool life skills if we choose to do that, you know, what are some of the other prerequisites? Should we always be starting with tier one, even though we know we have students who are based on learning profiles might benefit from starting at Tier three? I don't know if this is a skill set. I would say you should always start at tier three for students who can't, you know, don't have the prerequisites of X, Y and Z because it is such a simple, straightforward lesson that should be learned by everyone. So why not try tier one and just make the modifications about. Let's ensure we're not taking too long on tier one with some of the students. So maybe we think tier three might be needed. And rather than wait till everyone's gone through all 13 skills and then come back around and see who still needs tier 2, maybe we speed that process up a little. So we're not leaving kids who might need tier three instruction sort of, you know, floundering for the month it might take to do that. So I think precautions in place, but I would not say this is one where we'd want to be jumping to. I think they need two or three because most of their instructions in discrete trial training, this one probably is one. I would say let's start with tier one with modifications for some of their learning needs and then just speed the process along if we're not seeing mastery relatively quickly for some of these skills. That's just my thought, though. I I haven't read too much research in terms of like, what are the other pieces of the tiered model added here? So that's real area we want to see more of. Also generalization practice. Still need a lot of that, at least for children who may not follow kind of like our typical or our most broad learning patterns. So quick rundown of what preschool life skills can look like quick. We're going to take a little. It's my birthday. I'll take as long as I want. We're going five hours on this episode now and when we come back from a little break, we are going to review some other extensions of the preschool life skills and we'll be hearing from not just me. All right, we'll be right back.

[A]

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[B]

And we are back talking about the preschool life skills again for a third time. Very exciting. But before we do that, I want to remind all our listeners that ABA insidetrack is ACE and KWABA approved. And by listening, you're able to earn one learning ce. All you need to do is finish listening, then go to our website, abainsidetrack.com or click the link in your podcast player to go magically whisked away to a place where you can enter in some key information you'll need. Some of that information is about you, some of that information is about the episode. And some of that information are these code words. I'm going to give you the first one. Now you need to know these. And the first one is JAWS J A W s Jaws. It's like if you had two people with mouths, those would be two. Those would be Jaws. Or it's the giant shark from the movie.

[A]

Like, where are you going?

[B]

I mean, that is technically, you're right. Don't you ever stand next to people and you sort of tack like, oh, look, Jaws. And everyone's like, yep, there.

[C]

There they are.

[B]

I'm going to open and close my jaws.

[C]

Two.

[B]

Two jaws or one giant shark. Jaws. All right, so in the beginning of the show, we talked about preschool life skills. Let's talk about some extensions, some recent extensions. I forget who's going first. Jackie, you're going first.

[A]

I am going to talk about the Reese article from 2024 where they tried to. I shouldn't say tried. They did school life skill to support.

[C]

They sure did.

[A]

Skill development for children with Trauma histories so in their research they found that there were similar behavior deficits with children living outside of the home in residential or foster care as children in non maternal childcare, such as why they made the preschool life skills right in school. And children living in foster care residential care may experience complex histories related to trauma mental health and instability in their care or placement. And these variables may actually affect school progress. And they have. There's been no previous studies to date that have specifically targeted children with complex ACEs or adverse childhood experiences. That's what they'll sometimes say when they talk about trauma, although other studies have included children with complex histories. And to know this is one of the extensions of this study is many children are placed out of the home in outside care after the age of 6 years old. And previously, preschool life skills has only been has targeted young children age 3 to 5 or children with developmental disabilities. Right. So the authors posited that it might be possible that the preschool life skills could also be beneficial for skill remediation for those placed in out of home care. And research on trauma informed care has also they fit really nicely together. So research on trauma informed care could be incorporated into preschool life school programming. And they also said, hey, do you know what's weird? Only two studies have assessed social validity with the actual participants, not with caregivers or training, even though most of the participants could provide social validity. So the purpose of the study that I'm going to review is to expand on the research on preschool life skills by including children identified by social services who have experienced multiple and persistent ACEs so trauma and they were older than preschool children. They also expanded to include the treatment at the clinic run by a therapist. So that's going to be ultimately less time. Right. One hour a week instead of daily in school. And they were going to have, they were going to train caregivers to see if they could then promote generalization within the home as well.

[C]

So.

[A]

Oh, and they did two more expansions because they were just expanding all over the place. They assessed social validity with the participants as same and ran this in the UK instead of in the United States.

[C]

Okay, that's kind of minimal.

[A]

Yeah, it is minimal.

[C]

They're like in South Wales, mine's in Ireland.

[B]

So yeah, they make all these modifications. Like, you know, if they're requesting the bathroom, they change the bathroom to blue. You know, it's real hard. Like we just, we didn't know. Research is not caught up.

[A]

Okay, so there were two boys that participated in the study. Both were neurotypical but displayed challenging behavior both in school and in the home. And they were 12 and 9 years old. The 12 year old boy's name was Gethin. Now we know that they're not in the US this is definitely a Welsh name. And he was under watch of social services for four years prior to the study. Due to evidence of neglect and concerns, parents couldn't care for him and his older brother. And so Gethin currently was, at the time of the study, was spending four nights per week with his parents and three nights per week with his grandparents. And the parents attended the preschool life skills workshop, all four of them, which is nice. The second participant was nine year old Harry. He was in foster placement with two foster parents after having been removed from his home at 6 years old. So he had been in foster placement for three years due to his parents not being able to meet him and his three siblings Needs due to a history of neglect, mental health issues and domestic violence where Harry frequently had to take care of his younger siblings. At six.

[C]

Yeah, that's really hard.

[A]

Oh, so he experienced five placement moves across three years, which is a lot. And so the first author had documented. All had documented histories of both children and served as the primary therapist. So they didn't have to do any other trauma screening because they had all the documents about trauma being present. It should be noted that this, this research is also part of a multidisciplinary team at the clinic where the children were also receiving trauma informed CBT and therapeutic life story work. When I have time, I'm going to be looking up that.

[B]

Yeah, I, I can't remember if it was in the paper. If I just assumed it felt like some of the stuff we talked about and body Keeps the score.

[A]

Yeah, maybe, but I was doing that like I'm looking it up and I've got time. I did not have time kind of work. So that will be fun to, to, to delve into. So the setting was the clinic room where sessions took place. And they were one times per week for 15 weeks for Gethin and 12 weeks for Harry. And we'll talk about why that, why there's a difference. It's not because one did better than the other. It's because one did more skills than the other. So during week three, Gethin's brother began attending because this is when you started to have to work with a peer. Right. Sharing and doing friendship skills and however, do a history of aggression. Harry did not have a peer or a sibling based on the recommendation of the social work, the social worker. And so these skills were omitted from the curriculum, hence why his was only 12 weeks. Okay. Data were collected via pen and paper. The video was used for IOA and procedural integrity. And so Genthan did 13 skills across four units and Harry did seven skills across three units. And they did probes to assess each skill. They set up evocative situations so they didn't wait for them to occur. And some of them, they were like general, but some of them were very specific. And each presentation of an evocative situation represented a trial and dependent measures were presented as a percentage. So for each evocative situation, a correct skill was scored when the participant engaged in the skill within 2 to 10 seconds. So this is another place where they, in their limitations thought that it was a huge departure from preschool life skills. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but they did. They said that they were departing from how you would traditionally score because you could also engage in the skill but also engage in problem behavior. They counted both. Yeah, but previously that was not the case in previous preschool life skills. That makes sense to me.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So I don't know.

[B]

But I mean, you could, because you could. I mean, the Valiant Pence had that like students could still engage in problem behavior.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And the skill, like they were looking at problem behavior. Maybe. I, I don't know if they were just thinking about it as, you know, this is a different, you know, kind of different category of, you know, child.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Challenge that might be occurring.

[A]

Who knows? This seemed like a huge thing for them though. They, they mentioned it multiple times. I, it was high. So first they did an indirect assessment where caregivers were given a 13 item questionnaire to assess when challenging behaviors occurred and where There were skill deficits and they use this to make the evocative situations. And then here's where I thought this was funny. They did a pre teaching assessment where they had three initial one hour assessments that they arranged three evocative situations so that participants could engage in all the preschool life skills across all the units. The ones that they couldn't do, they added to the curriculum.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Then they did baseline. So I thought they could just use that for baseline, but they did not.

[C]

But.

[A]

Right. So then they did baseline and only the targeted skills that they couldn't do from the pre teaching assessment were part of baseline. They ran it similar to the assessment. They had the evocative situations, they didn't provide reinforcement or any consequences. So I'm not sure.

[B]

Yeah, it does seem, I mean, they wanted to be. May have been one of those just sort of like, this is an experimental proceed. Because if you were really running this procedure, you did the pre assessment, you can't do it. Okay, moving on. We need to teach.

[A]

Yeah. All right. So as part of the teaching session, they started with playing for five to 10 minutes with an activity of their choice to get them used to the room. Then they started each session by outlining the plan for the session which included what skills they were targeting, usually three to four. They reminded the child that they could leave at any time. It's a notable that no one did. And then they use bst.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Preschool life skills uses bst. They don't refer to it all the time as bst, but yeah, come on, it looks like bst. It walks like bst.

[C]

It is bst.

[A]

The one thing I did like that they added is when they gave the rationale, they asked the child why the skill was important and the child had to provide that. So if the child could engage in the response following bst, there was praise and only praise. They also slated that like nothing else was given.

[C]

Okay.

[A]

I was like, ooh, what's. Why is this money or praise? And then they moved on to the next skill. If they didn't engage in the correct response, they did BST again. And then they allowed the child to again engage in the response. If they did not, they just moved on and did it later. So once BST produced a correct response, evocative situations for each skill were interspersed across the 60 minute session until mastery was achieved. And mastery was three consecutive correct responses or five correct responses across the session. Boom. Then they did post teaching probes which were conducted one week following mastery and were identical to the pre assessment. They used a Multiple probe design across preschool life skills units, not specific skills.

[B]

Yeah. So four units.

[A]

Right. Four units across the skills.

[B]

Which makes sense because they're targeting multiple skills per, you know, rather than one skill per session.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And so then an hour of look up and say your name.

[A]

Oh, kill most kids.

[B]

Like, I don't want to do that.

[C]

Right.

[B]

I'm walking out the door. Thanks for telling me. I could leave at any time.

[A]

Right. Especially a 9 and 12 year old.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Okay. So then they tried to assess generalization where they asked the caregivers which most which were the most important goals for home. They were given data sheets to take data Ginthin. What did I say his name was?

[C]

Gethin.

[A]

Gethin. Yeah. Gathan's parents chose following one step directions, recruiting attention appropriately, waiting and greeting another person appropriately. Harry's foster parents chose multi step directions asking for help in waiting. But only Gethin's parents submitted the data. They also provided caregiving training workshops, four of them for an hour long. After the first training session that corresponded to the four preschool life skills units, they focused on implementing the preschool life skills at home. They did role plays and talked about when and how to practice at home. Since parents attended all four sessions, with both parents attending sessions one and two and the father attending three and four, Harry's foster parents did not attend any of the sessions, but they did. They were debriefed following each of the training sessions. And then the first author contacted the parents twice a week to troubleshoot and remind them to practice. That would be annoying to me, but I'm just thinking as a parent, okay, maybe once a week, but twice seems a lot, but that's fine. The procedural integrity was good. And then they looked at social validity across both the participants and the parents and Gethin's sibling who also participated. They asked the kids if they enjoyed the sessions, if the time was sufficient to learn the skills, and if they thought the skills were important. And the caregivers also filled out one. And then they made a little section on debriefing how they actively debriefed both ways across every sessions. Yeah. So every wish away, every which way, they did all the things. This was a very thorough study. If you want to replicate a study, this is a nice one to replicate. So, results. Mostly everyone learned the skills. Gethin required eight teaching sessions and Harry required six. So that's around two sessions per unit, while trials to criterion was five and four, respectively. Just like we thought. Functional communication unit two took the longest to master for both participants and the greatest number of Trials for Gethin and Harry were requesting an item from a peer and asking for help, respectively.

[B]

I would say that that's very different than many of the times I've run preschool.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But I'm, I'm thinking that that might be a component of their, you know, traumatic history. Well, it could be the age, but it could be the traumatic history too, of really struggling with. Who do I ask for help? You know, if they had all these adverse childhood experiences, you know, Harvey, think about that. Didn't have a lot of opportunities. They was. He was responsible for, you know, all the siblings. Maybe he just. Help was not something he was comfortable asking or when he'd ask, it caused more trouble. So I think that learning history might have something to do with it. So I think it is. It's great that they extended this to a specific population of, you know, children struggling with, with a challenge rather than assuming. Because again, what's, what's the, what's the, the take home here. Preschool, high school is great. Everyone learns from it.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah. But we can learn a lot more just from looking at the details.

[A]

Yeah. And so for. Oh my God, I'm forgetting his name again. Gethin, I put G in all of the notes thinking I would remember and I'm not remembering what. One notable thing that the authors wanted to point out, that they did point out in the graph is that there was very little problem behavior for Ethan across. There was a few in baseline, but very little in teaching, which said, hey, you know what, that's another social val thing. That he was happy to be there. And generally overall, the skills, they did acquire the skills during teaching with some variability on whether they followed up like in the follow up, if they could still maintain those skills. So the author said that one limitation of the study is that they should have had booster sessions, which they didn't. Harry's very similar in that way that he had, you know, a bit, a bit more challenging behavior, but really not a lot to think of. When you're looking at the skills. And generally all the skills were acquired during training. And then there's some fairly. A little bit of variability in the post training. And then when you're looking at whether there was an increase in skills at home, there's a tiny bit, right. Not a bunch, but a tiny bit. And so they looked at baseline following teaching with the data that Gethin's parents took, because the other parents did not. And there's, there's increase increases in everything. Right. Especially no, most notably waiting. But, you know, not 100% of the time. And maybe that's okay because they're still kids.

[B]

Yeah. We're also talking about these, like, very different environments. You know, we played for five minutes and we had a structured hour session as opposed to this is your life, this is every moment of the rest of your day.

[A]

Right. And what the author said is that, yeah, it's, it's likely that when they're in a very preferred situation, it's going to be harder to look up and say yes.

[C]

Right.

[A]

In those situations, social validity was actually very interesting because both of the participants enjoyed the program, but both of them thought that they weren't sure whether the program helped them manage their problems, which I thought they said. They answered not sure. And they said that likely both of them thought that the one hour session wasn't enough. So one of the things that the authors were looking at is could we mimic preschool life skills and only do it one hour a week?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And yes. But according to the participants, maybe more time.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Was needed. Right.

[B]

It could also be one of those situations too, of did they like the sessions because they were safe, they were predictable, you know, they, they knew what they could count on the, you know, the researcher to sort of run the same thing. Was that helpful to the students? So, you know, is that a matter of them just liking the sessions versus, you know, now that they're inaccurate reporters of their own behavior? But it might be, you know, could be set up more opportunities across their day, across times. Would they still feel the same way? Hopefully, you know, that'd be positive.

[A]

Yeah. And then parents also thought it was. They had higher rates of social validity and Harry's parents reported greater improvements and that he was able to access more services than before. But they didn't actually do any of the generalization at home. So the author suggested that it might be helpful if caregivers were involved in the beginning. Right. Since one parent group said it was hard to implement at the home and one other parent group chose not to participate at all. Right. So they're like, I want to do this, but we can't do it.

[C]

Well, that brings us to my study.

[A]

Yeah, that's right, it does.

[C]

Were you going to say something else?

[B]

Oh, no. You were second in.

[C]

Oh, okay, great. You were pushing in, then I'll take over. So this is the lee et al. 2024 study. Yeah, I know, it's super cool. So here we are doing three things. We are training parents to run the preschool life skills. We're training it in the home. And finally, due to guess what? The COVID 19 pandemic. We are doing it via teleheal. So it's a beautiful trifecta building upon some past research, specifically gunning et al 2020, who's also an author on this study where they taught parents in home preschool life skills or how to implement preschool life skills and then rupple at all. Oh, I didn't write down the year. But that was 2021, right, Rob?

[A]

Yeah, 2021. Yeah.

[B]

With the balance.

[C]

They did the balance program which is again parent implementation of pls, but they kind of like modified it slightly.

[B]

Yeah, it's a little bit more about some of the PLS skills as well as balancing teach, not teachers, adult led and child led time. So it's a little bit more about interaction as well as engaging in some of the basic preschool life skills, which is tough because I don't love the term balance as a program even though it describes what it does. But preschool life skills always is like, you know, yeah, you're struggling with some skills preteen, let's use the preschool life skills. It's like a non starter of like I don't want to be in preschool anymore.

[C]

Dude.

[B]

Bro. It's probably what they'd say.

[A]

Bro.

[B]

Bro.

[C]

No, yeah, the name isn't. Isn't as expansive and life skills sort

[B]

of feels like like vocational skills for right post graduation. No, not that. So yeah, branding. Branding. We gotta think about some branding options, right?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. So. But the Rebel article is. Is super good so people should go check that one out if they want to. It was referenced several times in my article that I'm talking about here today. So they say preschool life skills is a great thing to teach in home for parents because it's very functional, it's naturalistic. We can teach it using behavior skills training. The opportunities generally arise a lot because guess what? We're teaching the life skills that preschoolers need. So it's things that are very, very functional and it has natural consequences like built into it. So it's kind of the perfect thing to. To work with parents on. If you happen to have parent training sessions and you're not sure what to work on or how to structure them, might we suggest working on through the preschool life skills with the parents that you're working with at home is going to be very helpful for them and feel quite natural to what their challenges may be in the home. So they're doing all of that except they're going to do it via telehealth, as we already know because of the pandemic but there might be other reasons why you would want to target this via telehealth. We've touched on that in other episodes as well. It can help you reach populations that are outside of driving distance, families that may not have access to these types of services, and it can be an economical option.

[B]

It's easier to jump on a zoom than it is to drive to a location as well. So even if you don't have to use telehealth, if you can get the same results, it may be preferred.

[C]

But they might have a good coffee shop near their house.

[A]

Everyone loves that.

[C]

So that is an important factor. Yeah, too. Okay. In this study, there were six parents and seven children. Can you guess why there was more children than parents?

[B]

Siblings.

[C]

Yes. There was one set of twins.

[B]

I mean, I read. I read the article, so it's not really. Oh, I don't think.

[C]

Well, I guess that's true. Hopefully listeners at home got a chance to play along before Rob jumped in.

[B]

It's my birthday. I'll answer all the questions.

[C]

Yeah, so. So the one mom, she's like, yeah, I need you. I have twins. Twin preschoolers. Please come. Please show up in my zoom box. What is interesting about this study is that all of these children were typically developing. So we've actually kind of run the gamut in terms of populations in this. In this episode. So we had children, autistic children, children with emotional behavioral challenges, and now typically developing children. And these kids were exactly preschool, age three to five and a half. So not only are we doing it via telehealth, we're also going to use video modeling.

[A]

Oh, I love video modeling.

[C]

I know. So some BST paired with video modeling.

[B]

I used to have so many preschool high school video models.

[C]

Were you wearing a bow tie?

[B]

I wasn't in the video.

[A]

I was in a lot of the videos. Oh, you can find me.

[C]

Oh, those were. Those are old.

[A]

They're old, but they're still on YouTube.

[B]

I'm a preschool life skill video model.

[C]

Oh, but you weren't in them.

[B]

No, it was the children engaging in the skill.

[C]

Oh, okay. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Okay. Well, these are implementation videos like these. We're training the parents.

[B]

Yes.

[C]

In this one.

[B]

Oh. I had videos of what it was supposed to. What the skill looked like.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Okay. And I'm just telling you about the things that were involved in the study. The parents got a tip sheet each week as part of the training, and then they also. Which had, like, operational definitions on it. And then the parents are supposed to Fill out a diary of what they did each day. And that was kind of a new component that was added here as well. So they organized this as a multiple probe design across the PLS units. So once again, we're like breaking the skills down into these different chunks, which I will review what those are in one second. And the other thing I want you to know is that there were multiple dependent measures here because it was like the experimenters training the parents. And then we're also checking to see if the kids learned what the parents were attempting to teach them. And this. So they were looking at two dependent measures here and both of those were assessed via parent submitted video. So they were like, parents, do your thing, record it and send the videos to us. So the parents are supposed to submit two to three videos every week that totaled like 30 minutes of time. So that it was a lot for someone to code. So the child measures were all of the operational definitions for the preschool life skills. I will tell you what those are just real quick because I don't think we've said them in this format yet in this episode.

[A]

We haven't.

[B]

We've. We've generally said them.

[C]

Yes. So it was three different units of skills. The first unit is instruction following. And that included the following skills. Responding to name, again, not with eye contact, just meaning like drop what you're doing and check in. Following one step instructions and following multi step instructions. That was unit one. Unit two, functional communication. Specifically here it's recruiting parent attention, asking a parent for help and then framing your request to the parent. So being polite about.

[B]

May I have.

[C]

Yeah. And that was unit two. And then unit three is delay tolerance. And that has two steps. Tolerating a delay and tolerate. Tolerating a denial. So here you can hear how this is a Hanley original.

[B]

Yeah. No Friendship skills will be the fourth unit.

[C]

Yeah, they didn't do that here because it was. They were. They were home with parents. And then for the parents, they measured whether they correctly implemented the teaching or incorrectly implemented the teaching, which was more. They broke it down further than that, obviously, but for our purposes, that's all you need to know. And then they did IOA and they did PI and they did social validity. So they covered all their bases there and all of that turned out just fine. In the procedures, they started out with a natural baseline where they're like, just do whatever you normally do, parent and child. And if they didn't capture what they needed to in each of those units, from there then they did a more what they called A prompted baseline. So they're like, parent, make sure that you create some of these evocative situations so we can actually get the baseline levels that we needed. So they did that. And then once that was demonstrated that everybody did not have the correct skills, then they did parent and they taught the parents how to implement the PLS via telehealth.

[A]

Nice.

[C]

Yes. And so what this looked like is the parent and the experimenter meeting via post likely zoom weekly. The sessions were 30 to 45 minutes and the child wasn't present. So the experimenter never really did anything with the child. Note to note. Right. Because that, that's true parent implementation. And they used behavior skills training to teach. They laid that out really clearly in this study. And that looked like reviewing potential evocative situations with the parents watching those video models and then pausing the video models to review how the parent should then like use that to teach the child at home. And so it wasn't just like, sometimes I feel like you hear BST and you're like, oh, it, it can never deviate. Right. It's instructions, modeling, roleplay, feedback, instructions, modeling, role play, feedback. But instructions and modeling can be pretty nuanced and complex and specific. And that's what we saw here because those 30 to 45 minute sessions were just instructions and modeling.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

So it wasn't just like, I'm going to read you one sentence and show you a video and the whole session was two minutes long and we're done. Right. So there was a lot of back and forth of what this might look like and how they're going to practice with the parent. Right. And then some role, sorry, role play too, was, was built in there. And then after that and they said, okay, we're hanging up now. I want you to now go practice with the child. Right. That was the implementation piece and record it and submit the video back to me for the next week. And then if they got an 80%, the parent demonstrated it 80 or better and the child demonstrated 80 or better and all of the evocative situations for that one of three units, then they could move on to the next unit. Nice. And that's how it worked and that's how it looked. And then they did some follow up and it was all pretty much, pretty much lovely. And then I. So the. They had two main graphs for us to look at here. They had how did the parents do in their implementation of correct teaching during baseline and then during a post test when they had taught everything. Everyone did great.

[A]

I love that. I love that for Them.

[C]

Yep. So the parents did 0 to 50 correct in baseline and then they did 82, 90 or no, I'm sorry, 1, 1 did like 65 in, in the followup. So major improvements for everybody. And then they broke down how the children did in all of the preschool life skills. And I really, this graph is cool the way they did it. So it's broken down by the different units. Each child, it's actually, it's complicated, but each child had a bar and then they showed their baseline performance on the preschool life skills, their post unit one, post unit two, all the way down the row. So once the skill was taught, you would expect it to maintain over like each subsequent panel of the multiple probe design. And so that that was all happening above and the. On the positive side of the X axis and then on the negative side of the X axis, I'm sorry the Y axis. So positive Y, negative Y, they had the challenging behavior. So that was a bar for each child within each unit as well. And that, that bar they broke down by color. And so they had light gray, which was errors of omission, and dark gray, which was errors of commission. So if the child just didn't do the skill, that would be reflected as an error of omission. And then if they also engaged in some other type of challenging behavior, that was an error of commission. So it was what percent of sessions for each of those things. So it's like they stuffed so much information into this graph and then they had to list in the figure. Note that this is the order that represents the participants in the graph because there was no place left to put any additional information. So this is a jam packed graph if you are into that sort of thing. And by and large what we saw for all of the participants represented here is that they didn't not do the skills in baseline and they did it after they were trained. And, and both errors of omission and commission decreased following training. So it looks quite lovely when you look at it once you have a minute to like break it down. And then they added for us also information from the parent diary which included like all these varied settings in which the skills were taught and the context just, it was just like an added richness basically. And they call it, this was in Ireland, so they called it the garden, which is like the, the backyard. Right. So it was the home, the garden, the park, the zoo, the shops. The shops and all the different things they were doing. So meal, it was during meal time, playtime, screen time, a birthday party, baking, tidying, up.

[A]

Oh I love tidying up.

[C]

Etc. So. And they, they noted that the parent diary was kind of like a cool addition because they're trying to get more parent data and it made parents, you know, feel more involved in the process and kind of also expose them to like what data collection process is as well. They did say like they only they don't know what happened when they didn't have the videos, obviously. So is it possible that the parents recorded and recorded and recorded until they got a good one and then sent in the good one? In which case it might have been kind of nice to see some incorrect opportunities to know if there was a lot of challenging behavior still occurring and other scenarios etc, but given that this was done via telehealth, very successful. Great model for how one might do this. If you also need to implement something like this via telehealth.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Cool study.

[B]

Excellent. Well, I think let's pull into the dissemination station and start our wrap up. So if you have never heard of one of our preschool life skill episodes or never heard about them, maybe this is the time we might say you may want to go back to some of those early ones because although I think we did, you know, a pretty good review of what preschool life skills is, we really focused a lot more on the extensions to it. So hopefully from this, if you've never heard of it, you're saying, wow, that sounds like it works in lots of settings with lots of populations. Pretty effective and there's lots of modifications that could be done that I as a behavior analyst probably would think of in other instructional settings. But I don't know enough about exactly the preschool life skills. So you could go back to those episodes. You can also preschool life skills, you know, we still have on the website, you can get some of the data sheets I've used and then Greg Hanley's website, I think it's like the practical functional assessment site. I can't remember. That's exactly what it is. Has the original like, I think it's probably like the 2007 or 2013 curriculum. So you can just go pull that right away. It's got the triangle with the different units, you know, how they, how they all work together. It has lots of examples of evocative situation. So feel free to just grab the curriculum. He offers it for free. I still saved the time. Greg Hanley called me and left a voicemail thanking me for asking him questions about preschool life skills and appreciating that people are reading his research. Which is funny because I think everyone has read his research at this point. But hey, whatever, I saved that. That was my brush with Greg Hanley stardom right there. And we definitely promote the use of this. If you have used preschool life skills before. But maybe in like very specific, more of the tier three situation, hey, maybe try consulting with some teachers. Is there a teacher who'd be interested in using the Tier 1 version of preschool life skills so you could practice using it across different settings? I'm very interested in looking at the parent aspect of using preschool life skills because I know we're always looking at ways to do more outreach in school districts with parents. This feels like, especially with younger parents or parents who are just feeling like, I don't think my kids getting some of these skills or I keep getting reports that they're not sharing. Or would this be something that you could do as sort of a low cost intervention with families, you know, setting up the video models? You know, that, that, that would probably be the biggest cost. But if you weren't doing it over telehealth, you could actually practice the skills with parents. You could do the role play. You know, they might, might or might not like that piece, but I bet there's just lots of like small extensions and changes, you know, not all of them probably need to be published because the results I would guess would look similar to these studies, but just really just like a fertile ground for continuing to look at how preschool life skills can be used and not just focusing on the original kind of population from, you know, the 2007 article and not being afraid to make some small modifications for the setting or for the population you're working with using some of the kind of basic instructional design principles that were highlighted in these articles. So I'm very excited to keep using preschool life skills and I hope you are too.

[C]

Jackie and I tried to do a version, a very similar version of this actually years ago we did. I don't know if it was the preschool life skills exactly, but it was very similar skills.

[A]

Yes, it was. It wasn't all of the preschool life skills because it was parent generated.

[C]

Oh yeah, that might be it.

[A]

But wait, there was like some things that were slightly ordered, like screen time use was one of them.

[C]

But the challenge for us was getting the videos back.

[A]

Yeah, we never did or we got few. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

So overall, you know, it was the most successful research ever done.

[A]

It wasn't videos. It wasn't.

[B]

Oh well, yeah.

[C]

And it was. We did it in a group. It was group training, group parent training.

[A]

So there was 10 parents there. So I think maybe it was too many.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Oh, should we try. Try again?

[A]

I am. I. It is on my docket to try again.

[B]

All right. Talk, Talk me, talk me at the show. Maybe we'll get some.

[A]

Okay, great.

[B]

Do some extensions together.

[C]

She's very busy.

[B]

I know we don't see each other that much, so it's really. It's hard, hard to have these discussions.

[A]

I'll look at your calendar.

[B]

All right, well, we love musicalized skills. We hope you do too. I think I said that already. Let's move on to pairings.

[C]

All right, it's now time for pairings, the part of the show where I tell you about past episodes that you might want to check out if you enjoyed this one. We have talked about preschool life skills before. We talked about it in episode 34.

[B]

I said that.

[C]

Preschool life skills. I know, I got it. And episode 95, which was titled Preschool life Skills the Next Generation. That was with Dr. Inar Ingvarson. We also have touched on, you know, similar topics elsewhere. You Talked about episode 205, Rob, which was Joy in the Big Four with Dr. Shayla Alai Rosales. Also, this always reminds me of the good behavior game. I feel like both of these are kind of like behavioral inoculation types of skill sets.

[B]

Oh, I didn't say that. In dissemination station. That's the research. I would love to see some of those longitudinal kind of inoculation. Like if students can't do this at the end of the year, does the kindergarten teacher find those students, like perceive them as better students because they had these skills versus maybe students don't have

[C]

these long term benefits?

[B]

I would be very curious on that. I have some work. I'm working with teachers to sort of look at some of that information. But not like research, you know, not for research.

[C]

Yeah, I do it for research.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Busy. I can't even find a time to meet with Jack.

[C]

I know.

[A]

We did also implement a school wide preschool life skills across. I forgot about this. In 2017 across every one of the preschool classrooms from age 18 months all the way up to age 6.

[B]

Where's that data?

[A]

I didn't take it.

[C]

It wasn't for research.

[A]

That wasn't for research.

[B]

There's your longitudinal.

[C]

Yeah, I know. Those kids are in like fifth grade now.

[B]

Yeah, some of the original kids that did preschool. High school. High school. Graduated from high school.

[C]

All right, so if you want to learn about the good behavior game, you can check about. Check out episode 21 or also, I thought we talked about it more than this. But I only found one grab bag where we talked about it again, which is episode 237.

[A]

I guess Rob doesn't like it as much as he thought.

[C]

I thought maybe there's another one that I miss. Yeah, you talk about it a lot.

[B]

I. Yeah. I think we only had the one dedicated episode, and then it'll pop up.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Part of a study.

[C]

So in episode 237, Rob reviewed a Caught being good behavior game article.

[B]

It's just a different interdependent.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, I know. You could listen to episode 102, which was on PBIS, because that also reviews a tiered model of support. Or you could listen to episode 231 on emotional behavioral disorder treatment with Dr. Joanna Staubitz, because, again, I feel like there are some similarities there, and it's also one that is a dual diagnosis episode. For a snack. I am recommending a particular snack for a couple of reasons. I think that everyone should try snow ice cream. Have you had that?

[A]

Yes, yes, yes. We've made it.

[C]

I know, I know. You make it, and you make it a certain way where you put the maple syrup on the top.

[A]

Oh, that's. No one. That's. That's. That's. That's different.

[C]

What is that one called?

[A]

That one's called Snow on Ice. No, it's called.

[C]

That can't be right.

[B]

Ice on snow.

[A]

I'm blanking. Give me a minute. Keep going.

[C]

Okay. Yeah. That's not the way I had made snow ice cream before, but I thought that was just like, the Canadian way or something. Jackie. But it's snowing outside. Our kids are outside playing in snow. So I'm recommending it for those reasons. But also, I feel like it. It brings in a lot of the components of the pls in order to make the snow ice cream, because kids can't necessarily do it on their own for a few reasons. You have to wait until it snows, and sometimes it never snows. So there's a big denial or tolerating delay.

[A]

Sugar on snow.

[C]

Sugar on snow.

[A]

That's what it's called. But I've also made the real snow ice cream.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Either one. I think they're both delicious, so. So you can't always have it. Right. So you gotta wait. Once it snows, you still have to ask if you can make it, because sometimes the snow is gross and yucky, and your parent might need to help you pick the right snow. And then there are some steps involved to actually making it. So if you're gonna make snow ice cream. You just mix snow with cream and then you put some sugar. I was like, I add sugar in it. Yeah. And that's very delicious. And then Jackie's way, which is called

[A]

what, Sugar on snow. It's very easy. Yeah.

[C]

That one is so good.

[A]

You just put maple syrup on the microwave. You don't.

[C]

I know.

[A]

You don't even have to. You can just put maple syrup and just pour it on snow.

[C]

Yeah. When it was hot.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And so then it, like congeals and

[A]

makes, like a test.

[C]

Yeah. Like crystallizes the. The maple syrup.

[A]

Delicious.

[C]

It's really delicious. So either one of those, you could. You could try. But there are some instruction steps you have to follow. So I've hit on all three units that I reviewed. Well, if you do it with a

[B]

friend, I have all the snow ice cream. And if they arrive, I should offer them some snow.

[C]

That's right. Yeah.

[B]

And they should say, thank you for this snow ice cream.

[C]

You can share it.

[B]

Get them all in there.

[C]

All right. And that was pairings. Please enjoy.

[B]

All right, well, while we work on our preschool Life Skills snow ice cream curriculum, because it hits all the areas and we'll have high social validity, I guess. Thank you all so much for listening to ABA InsideTrack. Thank you for letting us do Preschool Life Skills for a third time. Although looking at pairings, there's a bunch of articles, a bunch of themes we probably need to come back to because we're like, we did that already, you know, seven years, so long ago. Time for time for more. Three views and two views. I guess that's just a review. I don't need to be fancy there. But thank you so much for listening. We really appreciate it. If you haven't subscribed to the show, please do so. You can leave reviews on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you like to get your podcast. If you want even more ABA inside track, then you can join us on patreon patreon.com abainsidetrack where you can subscribe at any level. But if you subscribe at the $5 and up level, you're able to not just get the episodes a week ahead of time, but also you're able to get access to our listener choice episodes that you're able to vote on. We do those once a season and get a free ce. If you want access to those book clubs we mentioned at the top of the show, right when they are released, hot off the presses, that's at the $10 level, which gives you access to those right away as well as access to everything we talked about and 2 CES for free for listening to those book club episodes. So a lot of reasons to join now at ABA Inside Track. [e-mail] ABA Inside Track. There's also some other little goodies that you'll get as well if you stay subscribed. But you know, we mostly focus on the, the content of the show because that's the most fun stuff we think. I want to make sure everyone hears the second secret code word. It is indie. I n d y Are we looking at indie as you know, Indiana, like the Stranger Things series finale, or are we thinking about Indiana Jones? Well, if you remember the first color indie. Is that a coat? Is that a color?

[A]

Indigo is a color. But if you want to nickname it.

[B]

No. Yeah, could. Or could it be that the most obscure nickname no one has ever used. Who knows?

[C]

Could be Indie from Bluey.

[B]

Just could be Indie from Bluey or the Indy 500. Oh, it could be Just remember I n d Y and remember this will get you not just, I think we mentioned at the top one learning cell ceu, but you could also get at get for kwaba. You get a trauma informed C eu and for IBAO purposes, you get a dual diagnosis ceu. You have to, you know, pick which one you're getting.

[C]

Hits all the.

[B]

It's hitting them all. I don't know how it's going to go through the database for on our end, but you don't need to worry about that. You just put in. That's what you want. All right, so that is our second secret code word. Some final thanks thanks to Dr. Jim Carr for recording our intro and outro music, Kyle Sturry for interstitial music, and Dan Thabot of the podcast Doctors for his amazing editing work. We'll be back next week with another fun filled episode, but until then, keep responding. Bye Bye.