PS498 Unit 5 Pre-Training Assessment Paper Example

Every Ninety Minutes and Afraid of the Flush: A PS498 Unit 5 Assessment Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS498: Bachelor's Capstone in Applied Behavior Analysis

Unit 5 Assessment Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the clinic, the families, the children and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles and book cited are real.

Why Assess Before Training

Toilet training research describes a common core of scheduled sits, reinforcement and a response to accidents, but every child brings a different pattern of voiding, different skills, different reinforcers and sometimes different fears. Before Amara and Leo began toilet training, I needed to know far more about each of them. Before writing the protocol, my supervising behavior analyst and I assessed four things: when each child voids, what toileting skills each already has, what each prefers, and whether anything about the bathroom itself causes problems.

Both children's pediatricians had already confirmed that there was no medical reason for incontinence.

Voiding Patterns

During baseline, technicians checked each child's diaper every thirty minutes from 8:30 to 2:30 and recorded whether it was wet or soiled. Over ten clinic days, Amara was wet at an average of four checks a day, with wet checks clustered about ninety minutes apart and most likely forty-five minutes after snack and lunch. Leo was wet more often, at about six checks a day, roughly every sixty to seventy-five minutes, with no clear link to meals. Neither child had bowel movements at the clinic on most days; both families reported that bowel movements usually happened at home after breakfast.

The patterns mattered. Scheduled sits are most useful when they fall just before a likely void. For Amara, sits will be timed for thirty to forty minutes after drinks; for Leo, sits will be more frequent and evenly spaced.

Toileting Skills

Cooper et al. (2020) describe task analysis as breaking a complex skill into a sequence of smaller, teachable steps, and assessing which steps a learner can already perform independently. With my supervisor, I wrote a twelve-step task analysis for toileting: walk to the bathroom, open the door, pull down pants, pull down underwear, sit, void, use paper or water to clean, pull up underwear, pull up pants, flush, wash hands and dry hands. Amara's step uses water, following her family's practice.

I assessed each step by having the child go through the sequence with the least prompting needed, recording the level of help required. Amara completed eight of twelve steps independently, needing help with cleaning, pulling up pants and flushing. Leo completed four steps independently and needed physical help with most clothing steps and with sitting.

Preferences

Reinforcement for voids must be powerful and immediate, so finding strong reinforcers mattered. DeLeon and Iwata (1996) evaluated a multiple-stimulus preference assessment without replacement, in which several items are presented at once and each chosen item is removed before the next choice. They found that it identified preferences similar to those of the paired-stimulus format in less time, and that top-ranked items worked as reinforcers.

I ran three arrays of seven items with each child. Amara chose a small bag of crackers first in every array, then stickers of animals and a light-up wand. Leo's top choices were a specific musical toy and a video clip of trains on a tablet. Because reinforcers for voids would be delivered in the bathroom, the team chose items that could be kept there and used only for toileting: the crackers and stickers for Amara, and the musical toy for Leo.

A reinforcer for a void has to be ready in the bathroom the moment it happens.

Leo and the Flush

During the skills assessment, Leo screamed and pulled toward the door each time the toilet flushed, including when another child flushed in a neighboring stall. Descriptive data across five days showed that he resisted entering the bathroom on most trials and that resistance was strongest when the toilet had just been flushed or was about to be. When he was allowed to leave before the flush, he calmed quickly.

My supervisor's hypothesis was that the loud flush had become aversive and that leaving the bathroom was negatively reinforced. The reinforcement-based approach described by Cicero and Pfadt (2002) depends on frequent sits a child will accept, so Leo's resistance had to be addressed before training could rely on sits at all. The team decided that Leo would not flush during the first phase; staff would flush after he left. A separate desensitization program would gradually pair the sound of flushing, starting with a recording at low volume, with his musical toy.

Communication for Asking

Self-initiation is one of the capstone's three measures, so each child needed a way to ask that others would understand. Amara already said "potty" at home in English and used a Somali word with her grandmother; her mother asked that staff accept either, and we added the Somali word to the clinic's data definition. Leo did not have a sign for the toilet. His speech therapist recommended a simple sign, a fist with the thumb between two fingers, which his parents agreed to use at home. Before training began, I recorded how often each child produced any version of a request near the bathroom: Amara asked twice in ten days, both times after an accident, and Leo never did. Those counts became the self-initiation baseline.

How Assessment Changed the Protocol

Each finding produced a protocol decision. Voiding patterns set the sit schedule for each child. The task analysis set which steps would be taught first and with what prompts. Preference assessment chose bathroom-only reinforcers. And Leo's fear of the flush removed flushing from his early routine and added a separate program to address it, rather than forcing him through an aversive event that could have made the whole bathroom something to escape.

Limits

Ten days of baseline captured patterns at the clinic only, and the families' reports of home patterns were less detailed. Preferences shift, so the multiple-stimulus assessment will be repeated weekly. The hypothesis about Leo's flush resistance is based on descriptive data and was not tested experimentally, which my supervisor judged unnecessary given the low risk of the chosen accommodation.

Conclusion

Assessment showed that Amara voids about every ninety minutes, especially after drinks, and already performs most toileting steps, while Leo voids more often, needs more help and fears the flush. A task analysis drawn from Cooper and colleagues, preference assessments based on DeLeon and Iwata and a brief descriptive look at Leo's resistance, informed by Cicero and Pfadt, shaped a protocol fitted to each child.

References

Cicero, F. R., & Pfadt, A. (2002). Investigation of a reinforcement-based toilet training procedure for children with autism. Research in Developmental Disabilities, 23(5), 319-331. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0891-4222(02)00136-1

Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson.

DeLeon, I. G., & Iwata, B. A. (1996). Evaluation of a multiple-stimulus presentation format for assessing reinforcer preferences. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 29(4), 519-533. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.1996.29-519