Question
Does video self-monitoring require the child to keep data and evaluate it regarding his or her social behavior?
Answer
It only requires it if you require it. I do have students count behaviors. We identify a behavior. For instance, I was working with a young man and he was pretty adept socially. He was in all regular classes without an aide and was doing very well. He did have this odd social mannerism of scratching his head that I could not get him to reduce. He would scratch his head all the time. In one minute, he might reach up and frantically scratch his head 10 times. It was very odd looking and very off-putting to other children. No matter what I tried, I could not get him to stop this. We videotaped him and it was a very concrete behavior that he could identify. I had him count it in a certain time period. We set a timer and he had to count how many times it happened within about 5 minutes. He could not believe how many times he actually did that. Then we talked about how to reduce it. The behavior then immediately went down when he could see the number of times and graphing how many times. It was very self-reinforcing to see that.
Tina Veale is Program Director and Professor in the Speech-Language Pathology Program at Midwestern University. Dr. Veale teaches courses in research methods, child language disorders, autism spectrum disorders, neurology, and motor speech disorders. Clinically, she addresses the needs of clients with autism and other developmental disabilities.
