Amanda M. VanDerHeyden University of California at …

1 137 Best Practices in Can t Do/Won tDo Assessment; Amanda M. VanDerHeydenUniversity of California at Santa BarbaraJoseph C. WittLouisiana State UniversityOVERVIEWCan t do/won t do assessment is a pragmatic proceduregrounded in the functional academic assessment literat-ure. It describes two possibilities with regard to childperformance. The basic premise of the can t do/won tdo assessment is that children who are not meetingexpectations for successful academic performance in theclassroom either cannot ( , have a skill deficit) or willnot ( , have a performance deficit) do the academicwork, or perhaps some combination of the two.

2 Thedistinction is important because the type of interventionthat is likely to effectively resolve the academic problemwould be different for each cause. Children who cannotdo the work that is expected in the classroom arechildren whose skills are deficient and would mostbenefit from a skill-building intervention. Children whoare not motivated to perform the work would mostbenefit from an intervention that arranges contingenciesto maximize the probability of adequate academicperformance. When children are identified as notmeeting expected benchmarks or as being at risk foracademic failure at Tier 1, the can t do/won t doassessment may be conducted at Tier 2 to identifyinterventions that are likely to effectively remediate poorperformance (see also Ikeda, Neeson, & Witt, chapter 5,vol.)

3 2; Kovaleski & Pederson, chapter 6, vol. 2; Tilly,chapter 2, vol. 1<). Can t do/won t do assessment is a toolthat contemporary school psychologists will want tohave in their arsenal given the shifting emphasis ofschool psychologists as systems change agents andinstructional consultants. Use of targeted assessmentto identify instructional strategies that will enhanceacademic performance of students school-wide in anefficient and sustainable manner is an expectedcompetency and service for school psychologists nowand in the future (see Ysseldyke et al., 2006).BASIC CONSIDERATIONSB ecause can t do/won t do assessment is a Tier 2activity, Tier 1 activities should occur prior to its is, use of the can t do/won t do assessment requiressome method of identifying which children mightbenefit from the assessment.

4 Following administrationof a technically adequate universal screening procedure,a subset of children who are at risk for academic failuremay be targeted for participation in the can t do/won tdo assessment. The purpose of the can t do/won t doassessment is to guide hypotheses about the cause ofpoor academic performance and the development ofeffective PRACTICESAt any given moment, each person must face thequestion of what to do next. That decision isinformed by both the person s skill and ability toperform and the person s motivation to act or to notact on particular options available. How individualschoose to proceed has been the subject of consider-able thought and research by philosophers, theologians,and scientists (Honderich, 1988).

5 The study ofreasons why individuals fail to take certain actionswhen those actions are well known to them has a Practices in School Psychology V 16:16:42 TheCharlesworthGroup, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 -Rev (Jan 20 2003)1 BackgroundBecause the performance/skill deficit distinction isfundamentally part of our own behavior and ourinterpretations of the behavior of others, there is atendency to make inferences. Teachers working inclassrooms with students who fail to transition quicklyfrom recess back to an instructional lesson may infer thatpoor transitioning is a performance deficit. In otherwords, a teacher may assume that because he or she hasrepeatedly asked students to transition more quickly ormore correctly that studentsknow howto complete thistransition according to the teacher s expectations andcan do so fluentlyif only the students are properlymotivated.

6 In fact, poor transitioning may very likelybe a stimulus control problem requiring a more specifictype of instruction. For example, students may notunderstand exactly what behaviors are expected of themduring this transition, they may not have been providedadequate opportunities to practice this skill withfeedback, or sufficient cues might not have beenprovided to signal that the transition is beginning andexpectations are in place with consequences coming forincorrect performance. On the other hand, teachersmay infer that a student whodoes not doa mathassignmentcannot doa math assignment. The commonsense nature of the can t do/won t do distinction invitesinference about whether a particular situation derivesfrom a performance or skill deficit.

7 Such inferences arefrequently inaccurate because they are based solely oncasual observation. For the concept to be useful as afoundation for developing interventions and reachingreliable decisions, the performance/skill deficit distinc-tion had to move out of the realm of philosophy,common sense, and inference and into the realm ofa scientifically based concept built on the the major turning point in the history of thisconcept was Bandura s (1969) integration of perform-ance and skill deficits into his social learning theory. Theclear definitions provided by Bandura combined with agrowing interest in the functional analysis of behaviorbrought the concept quickly into the realm of functional analysis of behavior provided a meth-odology for systematic and reliable evaluation ofindividuals to improve the accuracy of inferences madeabout their the fields of school psychology and specialeducation, Gresham (1981) was the first to make thedistinction of performance or skill deficit in the contextof children s social skills.

8 The work of Bandura andGresham helped to show the legitimacy and usefulnessof determining whether poor performance was causedby lack of motivation or inadequate skill from a clinicaland scientific next step was empirical studies directed atdetermining whether procedures could be developed toreliably distinguish between skill and performancedeficits and, if so, whether the distinction was meaning-ful in terms of intervention outcomes. In the nextsection, we will briefly review the research pertaining todistinguishing skill and performance et al. (1998) conducted a similar study with first-and second-grade children with deficient reading this study, researchers systematically introduced andevaluated the effects of treatments that were designed todifferentially affect oral reading fluency scores forchildren with skill deficits as compared to performancedeficits.

9 The treatments consisted of contingent reward,which was expected to benefit students with perform-ance deficits as well as instructional interventions,such as modeling and practice, which were expectedto have more benefit for students with skill findings indicated a pattern of differentialresponding to the various treatment conditions. Atleast one student benefited from contingent rewardalone, another benefited most from instruction alone,and others benefited more from a combination ofcontingent reward combined with instructional andpractice opportunities. Noell, Roane, VanDerHeyden ,Whitmarsh, and Gatti (2000) examined this questionwith three preschoolers.

10 In this study, children withspeech delays were taught to say their name when asked(a skill that none of the children could perform atbaseline). In this study, a baseline phase was followed bya reward phase, and if the reward phase wasunsuccessful, a training phase was introduced. For oneof the participants, contingent reward was sufficient toestablish the skill, indicating that lack of performancewas caused by a performance deficit. For the remainingthree students, instruction was required to establish theskill, indicating that lack of performance was caused by askill deficit. These studies were important because theyestablished a method for systematically evaluating skilland performance BaseThe can t do/won t do assessment is grounded in thefunctional academic assessment (Daly, Witt, Martens, &Dool, 1997; Lentz & Shapiro, 1986) and briefexperimental analysis literatures (Daly, Martens,Best Practices in School Psychology V 16:16:42 TheCharlesworthGroup, Wakefield +44(0)1924 369598 -Rev (Jan 20 2003)Best Practices in School Psychology V2 Volume 000 Hamler, Dool, & Eckert, 1999) and is essentially anapplication of behavior analysis in education.