An Evaluation of the Performance Diagnostic Checklist—Human Services (PDC–HS) Across Domains
Let the PDC–HS pick the staff fix—its chosen interventions beat guesswork in every head-to-head test.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wilder et al. (2018) tested the PDC–HS, a 20-minute checklist that asks why staff are not doing a target skill.
They ran the checklist with therapists at a private ABA clinic. Then they gave each therapist the fix the checklist pointed to.
The team also tested non-indicated fixes to see if guessing would work as well.
What they found
Therapist performance rose only after the indicated fix was used. The non-indicated fixes did little or nothing.
Gains showed up in all four PDC–HS problem areas: training, resources, motivation, and prompts.
How this fits with other research
Melendez et al. (2020) ran the same PDC–HS → BST path for mand training and got the same lift. This direct replication adds confidence.
Guercio et al. (2023) moved the tool into group homes and still saw big jumps in data accuracy. The pattern holds outside clinics.
Hoffmann et al. (2024) pushed it further, using PDC–HS with general-ed teachers and token delivery. Again, only the indicated fix worked.
Together these studies show the checklist keeps picking the right lever no matter who the staff are or where they work.
Why it matters
Stop guessing why staff are stuck. Run the PDC–HS, do what it says, and you save time and training hours. The data say indicated beats intuition across four very different teams.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Performance Diagnostic Checklist—Human Services (PDC–HS) is an informant-based tool designed to assess the environmental variables that contribute to poor employee performance in human service settings. Although the PDC–HS has been shown to effectively identify variables contributing to problematic performance, interventions based on only two of the four PDC–HS domains have been evaluated to date. In addition, the extent to which PDC–HS-indicated interventions are more effective than nonindicated interventions for two domains remains unclear. In the current study, we administered the PDC–HS to supervisors to assess the variables contributing to infrequent teaching of verbal operants and use of a timer by therapists at a center-based autism treatment program. Each of the four PDC–HS domains was identified as contributing to poor performance for at least one therapist. We then evaluated PDC–HS-indicated interventions for each domain. In addition, to assess the predictive validity of the tool, we evaluated various nonindicated interventions prior to implementing a PDC–HS-indicated intervention for two of the four domains. Results suggest that the PDC–HS-indicated interventions were effective across all four domains and were more effective than the nonindicated interventions for the two domains for which they were evaluated. Results are discussed in terms of the utility of the PDC–HS to identify appropriate interventions to manage therapist performance in human service settings.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s40617-018-0243-y