Monitoring outcomes of services to children and youths with severe emotional disorders: an economical follow-up procedure for mental health and child care agencies.

Human services have been slow to develop and implement procedures for measuring the outcomes they are committed to achieve with clients. This is as true in child mental health and child care services as in other services. A method is described for getting follow-up data on youngsters with severe maladjustment (emotional disturbance, behavior disorder) at modest cost, yet high relevance. The method is part of the program monitoring and evaluation conducted routinely by the Pressley Ridge Schools and involves telephone interviews with each youngster and others during the summer of the year after the youngster's discharge from treatment. The process yields two kinds of reports with different functions: quantitative summaries of data and individual narratives that sketch each youngster's experience. The method, developed over eight years, has had favorable effects on the agency's services.

Incidental teaching of mentally retarded students within a token system.

Six mentally retarded students were taught to name sight words during the token-exchange periods of a token-reinforcement system. Words appeared on 25% of the tokens, and a student was given two opportunities to name a word written on a token before the token could be exchanged. Sequential teaching of new sets of sight words via a multiple-baseline design was used to evaluate the procedure. Five of the 6 students acquired sight-word vocabularies. The data support the contention that token-exchange periods may be used for educational purposes.