Jane will answer questions that involve making a choice and accept the choice he made (e.g., Do you want milk or juice?” The student chooses juice and accepts juice).

Joe Student will answer factual questions about vocabulary and academic information that he has been exposed to in the past with 85% accuracy.

Stew Dent will answer questions about something that happened earlier in the day when given visual supports as cues on 8/10 opportunities.

So, when you write those goals, write them for specific KINDS of questions that the student is expected to answer. My point is that answering questions is different depending on the information the asker is seeking. There are surely a number of other types of questions that can be asked than just those I’ve listed here. Write IEP goals based on the functions of the questions you want the students to answer. Then you need to relate it to the topic and explain it in a way the listener can understand. Because you have to know that something happened or have information about the topic.

Why–Why? Oh Why? Why is so very hard? Why is why hard? Because the answer changes.Beyond the simple, “How are you?” that gets an automatic answer. This one can be a real quagmire for our students and they might bottom out when we as these types of questions. It might mean talking about someone else’s feels, tapping into the difficulty our students have understanding others’ perspectives. This in itself is difficult for many of our students. Being able to tell someone how you feel means you have to first understand your own feelings. Relating Feelings–again this one gets more discussion in future posts because it’s complicated.It’s a multi-step answer that involves remembering what happened, sequencing the story, accessing and using the vocabulary related to the experience, etc. However, suffice it to say, being able to answer a factual question (“Ice cream is cold”) does not mean you can relate what happened when you went to get some ice cream. I’m going to address this as a communication function in future posts. “What did you do this weekend?” is probably one of the most common. Relating Experiences–many times our questions are purely social and we are asking the student to tell us about what happened.They learn a response and they stick to it because it’s easier than describing something. Many times when we practice opinion questions, we get the same answer over and over even when we know it doesn’t reflect the student’s interests. Opinion questions are questions like, “Do you like sailing?” or “What team do you root for?”(These get even more interesting when students learn to ask them and don’t agree with the answer you give!). Questions asking them what a picture shows is a good example of a factual question. Typically they learn the answer and they can answer those.

These are the kinds of questions we ask about academics most of the time.

Factual questions - these are probably the easiest for our students because there is one answer.

Here are a few of the types of questions to give you some idea of the level of difficulty involved for our kids. For instance “What is this picture?” is a whole lot different than “What did you do last night?” Check out the video replay below and I talk more about the importance of this issue. However, I find it easier to break them down by function of the question. So, what kind of questions are there? Many people break them down by Who, What, When, Where and Why. More likely though, it’s that we are asking him different types of questions on different days.

Sure this could be that the student is unreliable and unpredictable.

So, we write a goal that the student will “answer questions posed by adults.” And then we teach it and take data and our data looks like the data point is on a trampoline. But we don’t always realize how these different types and purposes can trip our kids up. Obviously we know there are different types of questions. So, what do we need to know to teach our students to effectively teach our students to answer questions? 1. Not one of our students’ strengths most of the time. We answer the question because it’s a social obligation. Don’t answer the question and people think you are rude. Answering questions has a social function–we do it because someone asked us and there are social consequences. And yet, answering questions is not as easy or straightforward as it appears. Much of our instruction involves answering the questions of the teachers. Typical preschoolers usually come to school with that skill. It seems like our students should be able to answer questions easily when they come into our classroom.

Asking social questions autism