Assessing Meaningful Versus Nonmeaningful Task Participation

Once criteria have been established to help staff differentiate between meaningful and nonmeaningful activities, the next step in the evidence-based process for improving the meaningful utility of a center’s services is to assess the ongoing task involvement of center participants. Assessing the degree of participation in meaningful versus nonmeaningful tasks is necessary to determine where subsequent intervention is necessary, to establish a baseline level of meaningful task involvement, and to allow a center to compare its level of meaningful task participation with that of other programs for social validation and normative purposes. This chapter describes a step-by-step assessment process to provide a quantitative measure of participant involvement in meaningful tasks. The process described has been used in applied behavior analysis (ABA) investigations focusing on increasing meaningful task involvement in center-based programs as well as in a number of clinical applications.