Think of a mastery criterion as a “finish line” or a “success benchmark.” It is a specific goal we set to decide when an individual has fully learned a skill and is ready to move on to something new.
To ensure our learners truly retain what they gain, it’s important that our mastery criteria are thoughtfully chosen and based on all the evidence available to us. This evidence can come from research, from our experience as clinicians, and from feedback we receive from the individuals and communities we serve.
Let’s review five tips for writing meaningful mastery criteria:
Tip #1: Aim for Functional Mastery
If the learner demonstrates a skill at your designated level of “mastery” on an ongoing basis, will it have a noticeable positive impact in their day-to-day life?
For example: if I correctly complete 100% of steps to order a pizza, the exact pizza I wanted is going to show up to my home. Success! Correctly completing only 80% of steps to order a pizza might leave me with a pizza I didn’t want, or no pizza at all. This would not reflect functional mastery.
The same applies to our learners. If a child follows instructions to take three turns in a board game 80% of the time, but they never finish a full game or actually enjoy playing, have we really succeeded? We want to work toward milestones that have a noticeable, positive impact.
Tip #2: Plan for Generalization & Maintenance
Generalization is when an individual can take a skill they learned in a specific setting and use it in different ways and places. Maintenance happens when an individual continues to use a skill long after the “teaching phase” has ended. When writing mastery criteria, it’s important to consider what kind of mastery criteria is going to help that skill generalize and maintain where it matters most.
Safety skills are a good example of skills that need to be demonstrated in 100% of opportunities to prevent potential harm. If we are teaching a child to “stop” or “come here” near a busy street, doing it 80% of the time isn’t enough. That is a case where we might want to see 100% accuracy before we consider the skill mastered and ready for generalization in the real world.
While many programs aim for 80% success, recent research suggests that for some children, hitting a higher mark during the teaching phase – like 90% or 100% – is the best way to make sure a skill really ‘sticks’ for the long run. We want to make sure the time we spend learning now turns into a skill they can keep and use for a lifetime, even after we stop practicing it every day.
Tip #3: Ensure Age/Developmental Appropriateness
Generalization Sharing is a skill that is often worked on, especially with early learners during play. But have you ever met a 3 year old who relinquishes their favorite toy to peers in 80% of opportunities? Not gonna happen!
Instead of picking cookie-cutter percentages, consider what we would we would expect of similar-age peers. Depending on the learner, instead of teaching them to share in 80% of opportunities, we might instead write a goal that targets briefly sharing a moderately preferred item in 25% of opportunities and declining to share without unsafe behaviors in 100% of all other opportunities.
Tip #4: Support Dignity & Autonomy Over Total Independence
When choosing mastery criteria, it’s important to keep in mind that the best outcome for a learner is not always going to be complete independence. Our well-being relies a lot on our interdependence and we owe it to our learners to write goals with mastery criteria that recognize the supports they would benefit from to live their best life.
Especially for learners who have the most significant support needs, performing a task like brushing their teeth 100% independently might not be our highest priority. We might instead give more attention to supporting their dignity and autonomy by teaching them to follow vocal and gesture cues to complete the steps (requiring less full physical guidance), or by teaching them to ask for things that make the task more tolerable (e.g., requesting a different toothpaste) or ask for help at certain steps.
Tip #5: Make Success Visible at a Glance
We use graphs as a “success tracker” to see exactly how an individual is learning over time. By choosing the right way to measure a skill, the graph becomes a clear map of how well ABA therapy is supporting the new skill. Graphs that show a lack of progress aren’t always a bad thing – they help us understand what isn’t working and pivot our approach quickly to get the learner back on track.
Summary
At the end of the day, we aren’t just looking for high scores on a graph. We want the progress to be felt and seen in everyday life. By looking at the evidence available to us, we can work together to set benchmarks that celebrate each learner’s unique journey and set them up for lasting success.
