Are you curious what the research is in terms of teaching students with autism
to mand for information or request using wh questions like what, where, who, how, why?
We're covering that today.
I'm Dr. Mary Barbera autism mom, behavior analyst, and bestselling author. Each week, I
provide you with videos to turn autism or signs of autism around so if you haven't subscribed to my
YouTube channel, you can do that now. So today I'm sharing a short excerpt from a podcast interview,
podcast number 182 with Dr. Sarah Lechago, who, um, is an associate professor in Texas, she runs
a verbal behavior clinic and she's a researcher, uh, on the topic of manding for information. So
let's watch this short clip. And another thing that people, uh, I don't think that they forget,
but maybe that it's not at the top of their mind because you're so focused on their learner,
getting the questions right is make sure that they're using the information.
So does it help them? Are they learning something new? Um, for two reasons, one, if they don't then
the mand for information or the question is not functional. It's sort of meaningless.
And two, it also gives me information, gives me information as the teacher
about whether they remain motivated. Right. So if I'm teaching you to build a volcano,
so we use a volcano chain, cause I have yet to have a student who does not like it.
And I hide something that you need to do it like a spoon like we did in the study.
And they say, well, where's the spoon. And I say, oh, it's in the yellow drawer and they go get it.
And they're like, that's good. And then they set it down and don't finish.
Then that might tell me, oh, that's not very meaningful to them. Like they don't
care about this volcano. I need to move on to something that matters to them.
Um, or they don't know what to do with it. They don't even know how to follow the direction.
I gotta go whoops. They're not meaningfully using this,
this outcome, this consequence. I got to address that. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of work to set up,
you know, means of things, especially when you were talking about how and why. Um,
yes. You told me earlier that where and who were among the easier, uh, tasks. What about what, and
which, which both of them are in my video blog. I always thought what, which were a teeny bit
easier than where and who. Where and who are tougher for sure. Um, well, where, where is ok
is okay cause that's just a location thing so that I, uh, that one's pretty easy in terms of,
um, I can hide something if there's something that's meaningful to you for any reason,
and I can make it not there. And that's great. That's all I need.
Who, um, so who usually is one of those, Uh, we, we sort of, uh, linked it
to the where, so it was, um, where's the spoon. Oh, you know what someone else has it. Who has it,
uh, but there is probably other ways. That's the thing for each, each question type,
there's a few ways to contrive, um, that, that motivation and, and, and that's something for
people to think about because I urge people when you teach to contrive it under multiple different
types of motivation, um, which we call a sort of multiple exemplar learning. Like I wanna teach
under all these important conditions so that you're not stuck just only doing it under one
condition um. And you are trying to teach what, where, who all at the same time using a volcano.
um, or, or multiple ones, or are you trying to teach how under multiple activities? Such
empirical questions. No, these are great questions.
Uh, the, the research literature on this, and here's what here's, what's so interesting.
This is a ubiquitous skill. There's no denying how important it is, but when you look at the
research literature, It's relatively small. When you look at actually the verbal behavior research
literature, it's relatively small compared to the ubiquity and the importance of the subject matter.
One of the reasons is there's not tons of people who are just, just, you know,
with the benefit of being really well trained to, to, to do the research. It's not easy. I mean, I,
it's not easy. It's challenging research to do. And I think you're asking great questions. I love
the question about, should we focus on teaching more than one mand for information at a time?
I actually think so. And that's a study that I wanna do. I know that,
um, recently, Jess and, um, uh, J uh, it is Jesse, Jessle, and Aner Ingerson just published
on, um, what's missing where is it sequence. Um, and both are mands for information. So
what's missing. This is missing. Where is it? It's here. Um, uh, Tina Seidner and her co-authors did
a really great study where they taught, um, mands for items and then, and where I think it was where
mands for information using scripted prompts. And so the idea behind that study was so they
had three conditions. If they're playing with a child and their favorite toys,
if the child's, um, the control condition is have the child have access to all their stuff. So they
shouldn't ask for anything at that point. Then to expand for the item, if they see the
experimenter playmate has it, it's within view. And if it's out of view in that instance,
then teach them to ask, where is X, right? Where is the ball? Um, and so they,
uh, in this study, the children, I think, were already able to mand for the items. So the way,
the way they taught it was kind of intermixing, both the mand for information, where is the item,
mand for location and the item itself, which I think is really neat because you're establishing
a discrim, an important sort of discrimination for the learner from the start.
And so I think the next lines study should be evaluating some simpler mands for information,
um, or maybe mands for the items and a couple different types of mands for information at the
same time to kind of get that discrimination or get them to understand the difference
between the questions from the beginning. Right? Because otherwise we get scrolling,
which is, you know, going through the different responses, who has it? Where is it? Who has it?
Where is it? My son does that. It will, he can do that. Yeah. Um, and then, you know,
it just makes a mess of language. So, you know, Sarah's here, she's an expert, like
you, if you get in there and you start getting you're prompting to, for this child to ask,
how are you, he's answering the question. Like you have to stop you have to go back. Like my son,
when it was little, you know, we, somebody taught him probably my idea got, you know,
somebody sneezes and God bless you. And then if he sneezes, you know,
thank you. You're welcome. And then when somebody would sneeze, it was,
God bless you. Thank you. You're welcome. It's like, yeah, we have a problem, you know, but if,
if nobody's like going wait, that doesn't make sense. That's an error. We're prompting
an error. We need to go back. Is that important? He doesn't, this kid didn't want the information
about how I was doing. He, he would, it would be been a better exchange for me to just say,
how are you doing? Yeah. Have him answer. So really I'm, I'm just a big proponent like use
common sense. Like, you know, it's really important that children and adults ask,
ask for things they want and need. Yeah. Answer questions about safety,
answer questions about things they know and care about. Keep it functional. Yeah. Keep
it, make it meaningful. I hope you enjoyed that short excerpt with Dr. Sarah Lechago, who, um,
gave us some great information about manding for information. If you would like to learn
more about how you can help your child or clients who might be intermediate learners and might need
information like manding for information, prepositions, pronouns, all sorts of things.
I would love it if you would attend a free workshop at marybarbar.com/workshop
and consider joining our online course and community. If you like this video blog, please
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