What does teaching declaratives tell us about the criteria by which we can judge the developmental importance of treatment outcomes?

Abstract

This article uses examples of treatment research on declaratives to illustrate criteria for determining whether a taught behavior is a “skill”, not just a context-bound behavior and whether the taught skill has associations with other theoretically linked skills as one type of validation evidence. The article uses data from three treatment studies to illustrate the issues and proposed criteria. The article concludes with a call to consumers and producers of treatment research to use the criteria to judge the developmental importance of treatment outcomes.

Keywords:

• declaratives
• developmental importance of treatment outcomes
• validation

Acknowledgements

These data were collected with the support of NICHD R01HD27594, USDOE H023C20152, NIDCD grants R01CD03581 and R01034520. The 2nd author was supported in part by grant #T32HD07226 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to Vanderbilt University during the writing of this manuscript.

Deep thanks are given to the families who participated, the research staff on the original studies, and to the primary collaborators of this work: Steve Warren and Wendy Stone.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The author alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.