Collecting good data doesn’t need to be something we dread…not when we learn to make it simple and still get the information we need.   Classroom teachers have A LOT going on…we get that because when we aren’t training; we work in schools every day.  We’ve also lived with kids that have autism and have worked in many of their homes…and wow… parents have A LOT going on too!  That’s why when we need to collect data, it has to be efficient or it just won’t reliably happen.  Let’s say we want to get started on a toilet training program.  Parents will need to communicate how it is going at home and teachers will need to communicate how it is going at school.  It doesn’t really work to just kind of talk about our general impressions because we miss out on too much valuable information.  Besides, our perception of “how things are going” isn’t always so accurate when you compare it to actual data.  So, if for example, we wanted to share information about when the child is most likely to urinate we could just record times when accidents occur each day.  By looking at that data for natural patterns- a more refined and realistic toilet training schedule can be set which saves everybody time!  We’d love to hear about how you’ve made data easy to collect and how you’ve used it to make good decisions for kids with autism spectrum disorders.  Bev and Susan