Plan generalization probes before mastery by naming the people, settings, materials, instructions, response forms, and supports that matter to the person's real goal. Define eligible opportunities, timing, prompt and feedback rules, safety, assent, and what counts as trained or untrained. Prospective planning reduces favorable selection and lets the team distinguish acquisition in teaching from performance under genuinely different conditions.

Choose meaningful generalization dimensions

Select people, places, materials, instructions, response forms, or schedules tied to the person's real use.

Classify trained and untrained features

Record exactly which components appeared during teaching and which are novel in each probe.

Preserve ordinary supports

Keep AAC, sensory, mobility, visual, language, and health supports available and identify only the teaching help withheld.

Define probe behavior

State opportunities, response window, accepted forms, prompt rules, feedback, safety action, and missing or withdrawn trials.

Predeclare the decision path

Specify how results lead to added teaching, partner training, context adaptation, another probe, or goal review.

Track coverage separately from performance

Give each planned partner-context combination a status such as planned, due, completed, unavailable, declined, or invalid. The coverage denominator is the number of probe cells due by the review date. The performance denominator is the number of eligible opportunities actually observed within a completed cell. Keeping those denominators separate prevents a canceled community visit from becoming a failed response and prevents an unobserved context from disappearing from the report.

Build Finn's prospective generalization-probe plan

For the plan generalization probes before mastery question, create a versioned prospective generalization-probe plan. Preserve the target, client-selected purpose, operational response, accepted communication forms, eligible opportunities, observation time, numerator, denominator, independence, prompts, context, partners, materials, criterion, teaching history, generalization, maintenance, access, safety, decision owner, actual transition, and follow-up. Another qualified reviewer should be able to reconstruct Finn's result without guessing what counted.

Work through Finn's mastery example

Finn learns to request help with a classroom teacher. His plan schedules untrained probes with a peer during group work and with a librarian during a chosen community activity. Speech, AAC, and gesture are accepted. Ordinary access supports remain available, while the specific teaching prompt and corrective feedback are absent during the probe.

For planning purposes, the team schedules three eligible opportunities in each of the two probe cells, for six planned opportunities total. If the library closes before its probe date, that cell is unavailable and rescheduled. It is not scored 0 of 3 or removed from the coverage plan. If the peer cell is completed with two eligible opportunities because the third opportunity never occurs, the report shows that actual denominator instead of converting the missing opportunity to failure. These fictional counts illustrate denominator handling. They do not establish a universal mastery level, observation count, probe schedule, treatment plan, or transition rule.

Audit Finn's source evidence

Finn's plan records each context, partner, material, response form, ordinary support, eligible opportunity, teaching boundary, probe date, owner, and stop rule. It distinguishes a planned probe from an accidental observation reported after the fact. The team also checks whether the peer and librarian understand how to create a natural opportunity, wait for any accepted response form, and honor the request. Partner preparation can support valid access without teaching the target response during the probe. The audit also checks definition and criterion versions, data-entry history, invalid and missing states, opportunity selection, observer agreement when useful, graph or table calculations, prompt coding, teaching integrity, and corrections. Unresolved discrepancies stay visible and pause any transition that depends on them.

Address Finn's main decision risk

A novel setting can add risk, inaccessible communication, or irrelevant demands. Finn's team selects meaningful contexts with him and avoids surprise tests designed around staff convenience. A dashboard can calculate and surface evidence. It cannot decide that a skill is meaningful, safe, generalized, maintained, or complete. Those judgments belong to the person and qualified roles under the applicable plan and authority.

Choose Finn's next step

Probe results guide more teaching, context changes, partner support, or a revised generalization goal. A low probe score does not erase acquisition data or imply unwillingness. Record the decision, rationale, owner, date, support plan, and review trigger. Keep acquisition, generalization, maintenance, and clinical value as separate evidence so one favorable state cannot silently satisfy another.

Protect Finn's access and choice

Keep Finn's AAC, interpreters, mobility, food, water, bathroom use, prescribed care, health support, rest, relationships, and emergency help available. Ordinary communication, sensory, visual, and mobility supports remain present during teaching and probes unless the defined question concerns one support and qualified review approves the safe comparison. Use accessible consent and assent processes when applicable and respond to withdrawal, dissent, or distress.

Apply current sources to Finn's review

Finn's sources support purposeful generalization measurement while acknowledging that the literature does not provide one universal number of probes. The BACB ethics hub and CASP public summary provide professional context, while the BCBA Test Content Outline identifies examination content on measurement and skill acquisition. The WWC handbook supplies research-design context. A mastery and maintenance review, a replication of criterion effects, and a preliminary criterion analysis show that criterion details can affect later responding and remain incompletely standardized. A generalization case study and ABA instructional-design paper address purposeful planning. ASHA supports continuous AAC access.

Rehearse Finn's decision rule

Test the prospective generalization-probe plan with fictional cases containing 0 of 0 opportunities, a perfect 2 of 2, unequal session denominators, prompted success, a missing session, a weak context, an overdue probe, and a system-access failure. Confirm that statuses, denominators, holds, calculations, and review routes behave as intended. Store expected outputs, software version, reviewer notes, and the correction log before the rule touches live data.

Close Finn's mastery review

Review the prospective generalization-probe plan with Finn, the responsible clinician, and other specialists required by the target. Preserve raw data, active criterion, teaching context, client input, access and safety evidence, generalization, maintenance, qualified decision, actual transition, exceptions, and later outcomes. Keep the page draft and noindex until every manifest-named review is complete.

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