A maintenance probe schedule after ABA mastery defines when and where follow-up performance will be checked, which ordinary supports remain, what teaching is withheld, who owns each probe, and what result triggers support or reteaching. Choose intervals from the skill, risk, expected use, opportunity frequency, and client burden. Mastery data cannot prove maintenance because maintenance requires later observations.

Set the follow-up purpose

Decide whether the probe checks retention, everyday use, safety, generalization, support needs, or another defined question.

Choose intervals from the skill

Consider opportunity frequency, forgetting risk, consequence of error, routine schedule, burden, and available support.

Define the probe conditions

Record ordinary supports, teaching help withheld, setting, partner, materials, opportunities, response, and stop rule.

Use a due denominator

Report completed probes divided by probes due as of the cutoff and list future, overdue, declined, or invalid probes separately.

Separate schedule completion from performance

A completed probe can show strong, weak, or uninterpretable performance. Track the schedule state and the skill result in different fields. Useful schedule states include future, due, completed, overdue, declined, unavailable, and invalid. Within a completed probe, retain the response or step numerator, eligible-opportunity denominator, independence, ordinary supports, and any safety interruption. This prevents a 100% probe-completion rate from being mistaken for 100% skill performance.

Predeclare response triggers

Set review, added support, practice, reteaching, safety, or goal-revision actions without automating clinical judgment.

Build Hugo's maintenance-probe schedule

For the maintenance probe schedule after ABA mastery question, create a versioned maintenance-probe schedule. 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 Hugo's result without guessing what counted.

Work through Hugo's mastery example

Hugo's meal-preparation skill is checked at 1, 4, and 12 weeks after the acquisition criterion. The one-week probe is 9 of 10 steps, or 90%. The four-week probe is 7 of 10, or 70%. The 12-week probe is not yet due. Schedule completion is therefore 2/2 due probes, or 100%, while observed performance decreased by 20 percentage points between the two completed probes.

The completion percentage confirms that the due checks happened. It does not establish maintained performance. The decline prompts review of which steps changed, safety, ordinary recipe access, materials, opportunity quality, and Hugo's experience before the third date. This fictional home meal-preparation example does not establish a universal mastery level, observation count, probe schedule, treatment plan, or transition rule.

Audit Hugo's source evidence

Hugo's schedule stores criterion date, three due dates, actual dates, ordinary visual recipe access, eligible steps, prompting, numerator, denominator, status, owner, and trigger. It never reports 2 of 3 because the final probe is not yet eligible. 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 Hugo's main decision risk

Frequent probes can become continued teaching, while long gaps can miss a clinically important decline. Hugo's intervals match real meal opportunities and safety needs and can change prospectively with rationale. 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 Hugo's next step

A lower follow-up result leads to measurement confirmation, context review, client input, and qualified decisions about support, practice, reteaching, or revising the goal. It does not turn prior mastery into an error. 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 Hugo's access and choice

Keep Hugo'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 Hugo's review

Hugo's source review reflects limited universal guidance on maintenance timing and uses due-cohort logic to keep future probes out of the denominator. 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 Hugo's decision rule

Test the maintenance-probe schedule 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 Hugo's mastery review

Review the maintenance-probe schedule with Hugo, 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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