TARPA Research Begins!
I am very excited that the TARPA research pilot projects are starting, with the fabulous crew at Chrysalis working with their kids at home and starting the project at school. I’ve been testing a few typical kids as well (whoever’s parents will let me experiment on their children, lol, which means relatives and neighbors and of course my own often-recalcitrant test subject here at home).
As I’ve been working with typical kids fairly far above the range this level of the TARPA was originally designed to be testing, a few things have occurred to me as I go through the protocol. First of all, subsequent versions of the TARPA might do well to include some fast-tracking options/opportunities. This could be based on the number of errors made (e.g. one or less) prior to reaching the passing criterion during the first time the participant is trained on conditional discriminations for particular stimuli. We could then perhaps significantly reduce the criteria for passing subsequent re-training and maintenance sections, possibly even skipping retraining at the discretion of the administrator of the test.
It’s also been quite interesting to see the dramatic difference between a few younger and older kids on their abilities to do 2-comparison vs 3-comparison discriminations and derivations. This wasn’t something we had necessarily anticipated, and it will be very interesting to see the results come in with more kids of all ages and with/without autism. I wonder exactly what this difference in performance is picking up in terms of language skills vs attentional abilities, etc.