Many toddlers with signs of autism or older children with a diagnosis are delayed with language and need to be taught how to ask and answer questions so that they can hopefully become conversational. Asking questions such as “where are we going?” or “why did you do that?” are considered mands for information which is an advanced skill that can only be taught once a child learns to mand for more basic needs.
Mand training starts with teaching children to ask for reinforcers – usually single nouns and we build from there – until we begin teaching how to ask questions, for information that we will discuss here.
Once a child has learned single-word mands for items (both in and out of sight) and can also request actions (open, up, come here, etc.), it’s time for the next step – advanced manding..
The simplest way to define mand is when you request something you want or ask a question to request information from someone. In order for anyone to mand, they have to be motivated by an item or information, and they need to request it in some way. The request does not have to be a vocal-verbal request. A basic mand can also be a gesture, sign language, or made on a speech generating device. Problem behavior can also be a mand and we see this often in kids with severe autism who might cry or flop to the ground because they can’t communicate that they want something (or don’t want to do something) . Even if a child is nonverbal or non-vocal, they are manding every day!
The mand is the most important verbal operant because of the motivation in the antecedent condition (before the behavior) and the item or information is received as the consequence.
A mand can be a request for:
For example, by signing or reaching for a toy car or by saying the word ‘car,’ a child requests to gain access to a toy car. They can also mand by saying:
The way a child mands can depends on their language and articulation articulation ability and skill level. Mands can be used to gain access to different items and information, both tangible and intangible.
So to put it short, here’s what you need to know about manding:
As human beings, one of the most important skills we develop is communication. When we talk about it, communication includes practicing it by different means, including in verbal and non-verbal ways. When we can get our wants and needs met through requesting, it almost always reduces problem behaviors.
Manding is an integral part of communication, which we use throughout our entire lives. That’s the reason it’s so important to focus on manding and keep it as a central focus in all verbal behavior programs.
Since manding is the first type of verbal behavior young children acquire, this suggests it serves as a foundation for building more complex and advanced communication skills. That’s why mand training can bring multiple benefits for the kids:
There are three levels of VB MAPP, as follows:
Within each level of the VB MAPP, there are 170 milestones designed for testing various skills.
Within each level of the VB MAPP, there are 170 milestones designed for testing various skills.
We’ll go in detail through VBMAPP Mand Level 2 and just overview Levels 1 and 3.
Level 1 includes the assessment of:
In the VB-MAPP level 1, the first five milestones related to mand include the basics, like emitting:
While we are talking about higher level mands today, here are the basics of teaching some level 1 mands.
If you wonder how you can teach a child with autism simple mands, an idea could be for you to block the door when they want to go out. Just stand in front of it, and once you have established that the child genuinely wants to go outside, say ‘open’.
At this stage, it is crucial to only teach the basic single-word mands. You must say ‘open’ instead of ‘open the door’ or other advanced mands. Combining actions and nouns together is a level 2 VB-MAPP skill and we don’t want to start teaching this too early to prevent language errors and rote responding.
This happened to Lucas, actually. Because we were trying to teach more advanced mands before he knew the basics, he’d say ‘open cabinet’ when he wanted to open a bottle. This took me a long time to straighten out this error so please be careful when teaching mands (and every other skill) to intermediate learners..
Let’s go over some of the level 2 milestones that are necessary before we start teaching a child to ask “wh questions”.
In the VB-MAPP Level 2, the milestones related to mands start at milestone six since the first five are already covered in level 1. So, technically, it’s the first milestone of Level 2, but overall, it will be the 6th mand milestone in the VB-MAPP assessment. Before moving to teach level 2 skills, we want to ensure level 1 is fully mastered.
In order to move forward with teaching manding for information, we need to ensure that the above milestone of requesting an item that is out of sight is mastered. When teaching this skill we are reinforcing the mand by giving them the out of sight item when they ask for it.
Remember, a child can be motivated to mand for a missing item by placing what they want or need, somewhere they can’t see it.
When the child is presented with one item, which requires the missing object, they will mand for the missing item.
This skill is necessary before moving on.
The ability to say Yes and No, to respond with Yes or No, to a question is a very complex skill involving different operants – which is a combination of a mand, a tact, and an intraverbal.
Learning to respond to yes/no is a pre-requisite for manding for information.
A mand for attention is when a child requests attention from someone, whether that’s an adult or a peer. This is another important pre-requisite before you begin teaching a child to ask WH questions.
This can look like a child looking towards a peer or adult to get their attention or to share joy in something they are looking at, or it can involve touching something or saying their name like “mommmm”.
Once all the above is mastered, we can move on to teaching a child to mand for information by using what, where, who, which, how, and why.
To advance to Level 3, a child should:
Level 3 includes 3 new domains:
But since we are covering advanced mands here,, we will just be focusing on the mand column of level 3.
Now, let’s look at the mand training steps required for advanced manding, especially those related to asking the ‘WH Questions.’ As stated above, you want to start with VB-MAPP level one manding. We start the mand training by having a child request with a single word, like “cookie” when they want a cookie. But as we progress, we want to teach a child to request information they may be motivated for. The critical part here is that they must be motivated for the information, or else we will get a lot of rote responses and errors. So when it comes to teaching advanced manding and asking WH questions autism diagnosed kids, it is vital to start with the easiest mands: What and Where.
Once a child with autism masters the easiest WH questions: What and Where, the next step is to teach them the Who and Which questions, such as:
The last advanced mands you’d teach are the questions starting with How and Why:
Now that we have understood what manding is, the prerequisites and the steps involved in the mands training, next is how to teach a child how to start asking the WH Questions. It can be done in various ways, but the best way is to deliberately create conditions that would motivate the child to mand for information.
How to Teach asking WH Questions?
Asking questions activity in speech therapy is of high importance to children with autism. It is actually easy to encourage children to start asking questions, and the best way to do it is to start by making a statement that would provoke curiosity. This is called using a primer. For example:
But we want to fade the use of primers and prompting as quickly as possible.
The purpose of all of these statements, primers, or prompts is to motivate a child to ask “What is it?” If you look at how these statements are structured, you’ll notice that all include a hint of curiosity and provocation. This motivates the child to ask a question in return. But if you ask a question about which a child has no motivation whatsoever, then it will not work.
As you can see, questions of this type might naturally cause the child to ask “Where?”. In fact, this method will even cause most adults to ask questions starting with where, too.
In these sets of questions, the basic idea is to get a child to ask “Who?”
You’re probably already seeing the pattern in these statements, and you’d most likely have a bunch of ideas yourself.
Here’s the thing with these questions. You do not have to limit yourself only to the asking WH questions activities listed above. Sure, it can be a great start to use these statements in the beginning, but you should get creative over time and continue to come up with new and exciting versions.
The idea behind each of these statements should be to motivate the child to ask a question and get the information they need from it.
And when a child starts asking What, Where, Which, Who, and similar types of questions for requesting information, that’s an indication that they are on the path towards learning and mastering advanced manding!
Step 4 (final step) in the “Turn Autism Around” approach is collecting the data in a Mand training data sheet. The main goal is to increase the frequency of unprompted requests. Ultimately, this causes the spontaneous mands to go up, as well!
The data sheet is used to track progress in the mand training. If you inspect it closely, you’ll see that it includes information about prompted and unprompted mands in:
