Designing Social Competence Progress Monitoring through Curriculum Based Measures: a Pilot Study

Background: Youth with ASD experience social competence deficits that impact their ability to make and sustain friendships, initiate and maintain social interactions, and understand emotions in themselves and others. Without targeted intervention services, these youth often exhibit problematic social behaviors and can become socially withdrawn, which negatively impacts their quality of life and can lead to other developmental skill deficits. In order to adequately evaluate program interventions for individuals with ASD, valid and reliable assessment of progress is mandatory. CBMs are evaluation tools that measure participant growth and progress across curricular constructs (Deno, 1985). CBMs assess the participant’s skill level at specific probe periods during the instructional sequence, and determine what skills may be emerging as the curriculum scaffolds learning across the units (Rubin & Laurent, 2004). To date, our measures are the first use of the CBM format in a non-academic area, the area of social competence.

Objectives: We developed our CBMs based on the criteria established for academic CBM (Deno, 2003) which includes: immediately sensitive to small changes in instructional interventions, reliable, easy to administer, numerous forms that can be administered to the same student, time efficient, inexpensive to produce, unobtrusive to instruction, simple to teach. This study piloted the use of CBM to monitor the progress of participants in our Social Competence Intervention-Cognitive Behavioral Intervention (SCI-CBI) program. 
Methods: The CBM consists of five sections developed to represent the general constructs in each of the five (SCI-CBI) curricular units. During the ten-week intervention, the full suite was administered at pre- and post-assessment and at the conclusion of each two-week unit. Specific CBM items were rotated and varied to ensure that students would not be exposed to the same item, though the same constructs were assessed multiple times throughout the intervention.

Results: The current sample includes 8 boys (age 11-14.75 years; mean full scale IQ = 97.1) diagnosed with an ASD who participated in the most recent administration of the SCI-CBI program. Overall, results indicated significant change between pre and post assessment scores (expressed as a percent change) on multiple global measures (SRS mean change = 20.3, t=5.19, p<.01; TOPS mean change = 8.8, t=-2.71, p<.05; BRIEF mean change = 10.8%, t=5.13, p<.01). Students also evidenced growth on the CBM (13.8% on the total score), though this change was non-significant. Finally, as with previous iterations of the CBM, we found some significant association between growth on the CBM and SRS (CBM facial expression recognition and SRS total, r=.73, p=.06). Additional students will participate in the program in Spring 2009, thus the data presented here is preliminary.

Conclusions: Results indicate the possible utility of CBMs in applied settings as an efficient, applied progress-monitoring tool to capture discrete changes in social behavior for individuals with autism spectrum disorders.