Comparing the Minimum Celeration Line and the Beat Your Personal Best Goal-Setting Approaches During the Mathematical Practice of Students Diagnosed with Autism
Beat-your-personal-best goal-setting yields faster math fluency gains than minimum celeration lines for elementary students with autism.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Vostanis et al. (2023) compared two ways to set math goals for late-elementary students with autism.
One goal was a minimum celeration line: a fixed weekly growth line on a Standard Celeration Chart.
The other goal was beat-your-personal-best: try to top yesterday’s score.
Kids alternated between the two goals while doing daily one-minute math sprints.
What they found
Both goals beat the no-goal control.
Beat-your-personal-best made students solve more problems per minute and reach mastery faster.
The fixed-line goal still helped, just not as quickly.
How this fits with other research
Lord et al. (1986) showed that self-management boosts arithmetic for underachievers. Vostanis extends that idea by testing which goal style works best for students with autism.
Bae et al. (2015) found that kids with autism score lower than peers on word problems. Vostanis flips the script: when you give clear, self-competitive goals, fluency jumps up.
Bell (1999) saw that teens with ID gained 6 cm on a jump goal unless they had Down syndrome. Vostanis mirrors this: modest, reachable goals help, but diagnosis matters.
Why it matters
You can start Monday by letting the learner pick a tiny personal-best target, like “beat 18 correct digits today.” Post yesterday’s score where they see it. One minute of practice, quick graph, done. No fancy charting needed.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
AbstractThis study compared two goal-setting approaches found in the Precision Teaching literature, namely the minimum celeration line and the beat your personal best during the mathematical practice of three male students diagnosed with autism, aged 8–9. An adapted alternating treatments design with a control condition was embedded in a concurrent multiple baseline across participants design. Each approach was randomly allocated to either the multiplication/division (×÷) table of 18 or 19, while no approach was allocated to the ×÷14 table that acted as a control. Instruction utilized number families and consisted of (a) untimed practice, (b) frequency-building, (c) performance criteria, (d) graphing, and (e) a token economy. Upon practice completion, an assessment of maintenance, endurance, stability, and application (MESA) was conducted. Participants improved with both conditions and maintained their performance well, while improvements with the control condition were weak. The beat your personal best approach was highlighted as slightly more effective in terms of average performance and more efficient in terms of timings needed to achieve criterion. No differences were identified in terms of learning rate (i.e., celeration) or performance on the MESA. More research is warranted to identify which goal-setting procedure is more appropriate for students in special education.
Journal of Behavioral Education, 2023 · doi:10.1007/s10864-021-09432-7