Preference Assessments

Summary: A preference assessment is how you find out what a client will actually work for. This page walks through the four methods you'll see on the exam and on the job (MSWO, paired-stimulus, free operant, single-stimulus), when to reach for each one, how to run them without contaminating your own data, and the one distinction the exam loves: preference is not the same thing as reinforcement.

Here's the problem every program runs into. You can have a perfect teaching procedure, clean data sheets, a sharp BCBA writing the plan, and none of it works if the client doesn't care about the reward you're handing over. A preference assessment is the systematic way you figure out what a client likes, so you stop guessing. You present items, you watch what they pick, you rank the results. That ranking tells you where to start.

Notice the word "may." A preference assessment tells you what a client prefers. It does not, on its own, tell you what will reinforce behavior. Hold onto that distinction. It comes back at the end of this page and it shows up on the exam constantly.

Why you bother running one

You could just ask a parent "what does she like?" and call it a day. Sometimes that's a fine starting point. But parent report is often wrong, or out of date, or based on what the kid liked six months ago. The structured assessment gives you data instead of opinion.

Running one well gets you a few concrete things. You find items that are likely to motivate the client. You get a hierarchy, so you know the iPad beats the bubbles beats the puzzle, which matters when you're deciding what to use for easy tasks versus your hardest demands. You also walk away with a range of preferred items, not just one, which is what saves you when the client satiates on their favorite halfway through session. And the whole thing is individualized. What works for one six-year-old means nothing for the next.