The education programs of developmentally disabled children are defined in an Individual Education Program IEP which establishes long-term goals tailored to the needs of the individual student. In most school and therapy settings these goals are developed with the expectation that they can be accomplished within a single year. At the end of the year, the goals are reviewed and new goals are developed for the next year. The goals must be written in measurable terms so that progress and mastery can be clearly documented, explained and continued from one year to the next, as appropriate.

Short-term instructional objectives are measurable, intermediate steps between the student's present level of performance and the larger annual goals. Generally, students work on a collection of ten to twenty objectives for which data must be collected. For children with intensive needs the objectives usually include social skills, communication, adaptive, engagement or attending, play, imitation, and reducing problem behaviors (Wolery & Garfinkle 2002). The objectives are broken down further into specific instructional targets. For example, when teaching non-verbal (gesture) imitation, individual targets might be to “clap” or “turn around” (Calouri & Hamblen 1996). Older students might work on self help concepts like selecting items at a grocery store or performing the steps necessary to do laundry.

A teacher or user with edit privilege may add and edit instructional goals and objectives in several different ways:

• Create New Goals
• Goal Wizard: Create a new goal from scratch using a wizard
  
• Goal Edit View: Create a new goal from scratch
• Quick Edit View: Create several goals, objectives and targets at once
  
• Import Goal from Sample Goals: Create a new goal from our data bank of existing goals. You may alter the base goal as you wish
• Edit Existing Goals: Alter the objective, add targets, change the criteria for Mastery, etc. Tip: Once data has been collected you may NOT change the "Type" , that is to say "style" of data being collected.
• Advanced Edit: Allows users to copy goals and objectives either to the current student or to any other student they have edit permission for.  It also allows the user to delete goals , objectives and targets or merge individual instructional targets.
• Copy goal
• Copy objective
• Delete goal
• Merge targets
• Delete target
  

Detailed Description of Instructional Goals:

Below is a sample Instructional Goal with a single Instructional Objective and one Target:



Each section of an instructional goal is described below:

Goal:

• Goal Name: Name you want to call this goal
• Subject area: Whatever grouping you wish to place this under.
• Active: By default the goal will be made active, but you can make it inactive at a later time.
• Long-term Annual Goals: Describe that this goal accomplishes. This detail may come directly from the student's IEP.

Objective:

• Objective: What is the specific objective for this goal?
• Instruction: An instruction that can be given to the student when requesting them to perform the objective.
• Baseline: The student's performance on the objective at the beginning of the objective period.
  
• Response: The expected outcome by the student.
• Prompts: Type of prompt (cue) to give to assist the student.
• Data Collection Type: Data collection format (e.g. correct/incorrect, Likert, prompts ...).
• Number of Trials: The number of individual pieces of data that can be collected for a single target on a single data collection screen.
• DDtrac allows the following information to be set related to Mastery:
  
  • % for Mastery: The percentage of correct responses the student must achieve during the measurement period to master an individual target associated with this objective (Mastery Percent).
  • Criteria for Mastery: The level of proficiency the student must demonstrate on a single response for it to count positively towards mastery.  By default the student must receive a "correct" for the response to count but this can be set to "correct with prompt" or to a specific prompt (for prompt data collection types) (Mastery Criteria.
  • # Sessions for Mastery: The number of sessions to look back at to determine if a student has mastered a target associated with this objective (Mastery Sessions).
  • Mastery Goal: The number of targets that should be mastered by the end of a measurement period (usually 1 year).  This is the total number of "Active" targets defined for the student (by default). 
    • However the Mastery Chart can be generated for all of the targets defined for the student or any number of targets specified at the time the chart is generated.
• Files: Files are attached files that can be images, PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc. which are used either to provide additional information about an objective or to document student work.
• Notes: Any additional notes describing the goal or objective, how it will be taught, requirements, current levels of performance etc.

Targets:

• Target name: Each objective has one or more targets that you collect data for. Each target has a:
• Date Introduced
• Date Mastered
• Optional Comments
• Active or inactive.

Important Note: Please see

• Manage Objectives-Targets
• Instructions-Prompts
• Data Collection Type
• Mastery
• Active-Inactive Status
• Annual Goals
• Instructional Objectives
• Targets
• File Upload
  

for additional information to help you better understand these important topics and how they impact your data collection with DDtrac.

Also see our background information on IEPs and RTI available on our main website.