[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: KMM
Date: 26 Oct 2004
Time: 22:20:38 -0500
Remote Name: 68.81.82.176
What’s the success rate of the 4 stages of skill acquisition? Can someone regress after successful treatment? How often does this happen? Dear Katie, Thank you for your challenging questions. It’s not so much whether there is a “success rate” of the stages or not. The model has been developed from my clinical observations and experience in watching how people learn new behaviors. I have observed that everybody learns in a similar sequence and that the model explains how we learn something (anything) new, so that we can represent it on the learning curve. It helps to explain the process of how we learn, especially to someone who has inappropriate expectation levels for too rapid (or out of sequence) changes. I remember when I first saw how the model could be applied to help a parent understand why her little girl, who had said her very first /k/ sound on Monday, was not using it in all her /k/ words at home and at school and at the store and at the library on Tuesday. I remember her look of insight (and relief) when I showed her that she was looking at step 4 in the outside world as a basis for making her judgment of “improvement”, when we were still working on step 2 in the clinic. This put her daughter’s status in perspective for her and the situation changed from one of frustration and disappointment to satisfaction and pleasure, as she learned how to help her daughter move to the next (appropriate) sequential step in her treatment program. The issue is not the success rate of the 4 stages per se, but the success rate of people’s understanding of the model to explain how we best learn in a step-wise, positive progression that is both horizontal and vertical in nature. There is no concept of regression in the MSAM, because any goal that is difficult to attain is simply represented at a higher complexity level and the steps to achieve the goal are broken down into tiny increments (“baby steps”) that can be successfully traversed. I often use the parallel of the Olympics when establishing appropriate expectation levels for success. Even an Olympic champion can fall off his bike in the final race. He may still be the best in the world, and he never has to return to the level of having to learn how to ride a bike again, but at the highest level of performance anxiety, he can lose coordination and fall off his bike. We all respond to high anxiety performance levels in the same way, by losing coordination. But this is not regression. This is dealing with a skill that is always developing, and that is being put to the challenge within a hierarchy of increasingly difficult levels of environmental complexity. For the SLP, the MSAM can therefore assist in representing the status of each communication goal during the course of treatment. The model is applicable across all therapeutic environments, but in the context of this conference, my focus has been on showing that it has been particularly helpful in providing a framework within which to help establish appropriate expectation levels for clients, parents, teachers .and other professionals in attaining, maintaining and transferring fluency in the schools.