2.  Team approach › Combined efforts between professionals from the Provincial Integration Support program (PISP) and School District #36 ( Occupational therapist (OT), Physiotherapist (PT), Augmentative Communication Teacher (Aug-Com), Special Education Assistant (SEA), Resource Teacher, Classroom teacher) and Ms. Adamson (Jessica’ mother).  Completing a Language Comprehension checklist › Completed by Jessica’s mother and her SEA and Teacher, this checklist focuses on Jessica’s language comprehension. Ex. How does Jessica demonstrate her understanding when someone talks to her?)  Look at what motivates Jessica › Jessica has a severe acquired brain injury and cortical visual impairment. With combined efforts between home and school we developed a list of motivators for Jessica that we considered when developing her IEP objectives (Ex. Humor (funny sounds), music (soft, with headphones), favorite people (SEA, mom), swimming, vibrations etc.

3.  Cause and Effect › Jessica entered grade 8 appearing to have no concept of “if I do this…that will happen.” › As a team, we felt that Jessica needed to have more control over her environment. › If we could teach her to smile consistently, we felt this would have a direct effect on other objectives regarding the use of a switch for environmental control (Ex. Jessica will activate her switch to be an activate participant in her art class.) %% › Given Jessica’s present level of functioning and her motivators, it became obvious to the OT that Jessica’s smile was her most reliable motor movement to activate her switch. › We want to teach Jessica to smile on command which would also activate her switch and give her control over one more aspect of her environment. %%

4.  By June 2011, Jessica will smile in order to activate an ultra-light switch positioned on her right cheek within 8 seconds to play music on her pod – whiz (I-pod). (As music is a strong motivator for Jessica, we used her pod –whiz for data collection. Jessica uses her ultra-light switch daily to help others (operate an appliance), have a voice (use step by step to greet others) but we are not collecting data on those activities etc. They simply provide Jessica an opportunity to practise this objective (to reinforce cause and effect).

6. Part 2: How do we measure progress? Data Collection

7. 1. Taking baseline  Taken over 3 consecutive days, this is necessary to determine the starting point for measuring progress.  As with taking any data, baseline should be taken at a time when student learning is optimal (beginning of the day, uninterrupted, etc.) Taking a look at Jessica’s baseline Jan 19 (Sec ) Jan 20 Feb 21 1 7413 2 1465 3 919 4 153514 5 5129 6 81933 7 18516 8 6631 9 10 Average Seconds 10.251116.25 Objective: Jessica will activate an ultra-light switch, positioned on her right cheek within 8 seconds to activate her pod whiz. Procedure: 1.Record the length of time it takes Jessica to activate the switch to restart the music playing, after the music has stopped. 2.Add up the scores in each column and divide by the number of trials to obtain the average.

8. 2. Ongoing data collection:  Over three consecutive days, ongoing data is taken once a month after baseline data is collected. It’s really that simple! 3. Considerations:  student health/illness – on what should have been day three of our baseline, Jessica was absent from school. While this isn’t ideal, this is the reality for our students and we kept moving forward.  best time to collect data – if health is a major consideration, we found it best to aim for Monday or Tuesday (greater chance to get in 3 days)  Trouble remembering? I chose my mid month pay to remind myself that we need to take another data sample  Location – quiet space, uninterrupted (Resource room). While Jessica practises using her switch in her Art class, this is not an ideal location for collecting data  Prompt dependency - It was only through our ongoing data collection process that we were able to see that Jessica was prompt dependent.

9. Jan 19 (Sec) Jan 20 Feb 21 Feb 22 Feb 23 Mar 16 Mar 17 Apr 13 Apr 14 Apr 15 May 11* May 12* May 13* 1 7413678711515121615 2 1465412109611 41413 3 9199107464789 4 1535146156463427308 5 5129279123585132719 6 8 3322784394152217 7 18516 8456113 12 8 66311454441026149 9 21121089836 1286351931476 Average Seconds 10.251116.2514.39.37.55.16.18.85.711.616.111.9 Please record the length of time it takes Jessica to press a switch placed on her right cheek to restart the music playing after the music has stopped. Then calculate the average time.

10. Prompt dependency - It was only through our ongoing data collection process that we were able to see that Jessica was prompt dependent.