Do you know how to evaluate your child or student’s daily living skills? How do you determine if your teen is on track? Are they meeting their full potential? Could you be helping them achieve more independence and more of their personal goals?
If these are questions you are consistently asking about your teen’s essential living skills, you’ve come to the right place. How we evaluate daily living skills (DLS) can make a significant impact on helping our teens. 
How to Evaluate Your Teen’s Essential Living Skills
Even though we know that targeting daily living skills (DLS) is important for diverse learners, so many parents and teachers struggle to understand how to evaluate them. Below you’ll find the pros and cons of four different ways to explore your teen’s essential living skills, along with a few other thoughts to help you get started:
4 Ways to Evaluate Your Teen’s Daily Living Skills
Standardized Daily Living Skills Assessment
When we first think about evaluating essential living skills, we might jump to “Well, isn’t there a test for that?” The answer is yes. There are several options available to teachers and professionals to measure independence on a myriad of essential living skills. However, we’ve already written an entire article about why these assessments fall short for diverse learners, especially when making values-based decisions about your teen’s performance on daily living skills. However, if you’re looking for a ‘standard score’ or to rank your teen’s performance, you may consider this option.
Pros: Can be a starting place for conversations; may meet requirements of third-party payors/IEP services.
Cons: There are many. See our full article “The Trouble with Standardized Daily Living Skills Assessments” for more info.
Use your teen’s self-report
Have you ever considered evaluating your teen’s essential living skills (and where to get started on them) by talking with your teen? Sometimes we forget—especially with our learners with unique needs—that they can and should have a voice in fostering their independence. Start with questions like:
- How do you think you do on ____ skill?
- How much help do you need when you do _____?
- What skills do you need help with most? The least?
- What do you wish you knew how to do better?
- What do you think you need to know to get a job, live on your own, go to college, etc.?
Understanding how your teen self-reports their own performance on goal areas like health, personal finances, and career planning can make a big difference in how you plan for setting goals and motivating your teen. Consider gathering information at the source if you’re in the early stages of evaluating your teen’s essential living skills.
Pros: Your teen has the most autonomy in decision-making about their independence; offers insights directly from the learner; Studies show the value of using self-monitoring with diverse learners.
Cons: Not all learners with diverse needs can evaluate or monitor behavior without prior teaching; we don’t always monitor our behavior accurately.
Caregiver Report
As a parent or teacher of a teen with unique learning needs, more than likely, you’ve been asked to report on your teen’s behavior. If you’re evaluating your teen’s essential living skills, it can be helpful to gain more insight from the other adults who support a learner.
For parents, asking your child’s teachers, coaches, or boss about your child’s independence can provide a great deal of information not only about strengths but also about what skills your teen still needs for greater autonomy.
For teachers, connecting with a learner’s parents can gain insight into household or community skills that are difficult to observe at school. Likewise, connecting with other care professionals like PT, OT, and vocational training can provide insights into what’s working in different environments and what may help evaluate the classroom.
Pros: Gathering a teen’s care team together can support person-centered and values-based decision making; Other caregivers may observe skills you’re not able to; Teens may respond differently in different environments, so gathering more information on what others see can provide a complete picture.
Cons: Studies have shown that caregivers may under or overestimate skills when reporting to other professionals when compared to client self-report; not all caregivers are interested in or available for reporting; gathering caregiver reports from multiple sources can take time and delay working on skills;
Direct Observation
By far, the most valuable tool for gathering information about your teen’s essential living skills is through direct observation of your learner. Watching your learner perform a skill is the best way to know how much support your teen needs to succeed at a skill. So even if you gathered self-report and caregiver report information, it’s still best to observe your learner.
Pros: Provides the most information about your teen’s performance; conducted in the setting where the skill happens; identifies how much support is needed to succeed.
Cons: Teens may respond differently when observed; takes time and some basic preparations; may encounter challenging behavior or resistance.
How to Complete A Direct Observation
Not sure how to go about a direct observation of your teen’s essential living skills? Follow these steps:
Step 1 – Identify the skill
Identify an essential living skill to observe and write out a definition of the behavior. If the task has multiple steps, it can be helpful to write out and evaluate each step.
Step 2 – Identify when to observe
Not all essential living skills happen within your teen’s daily routine. Therefore, you may need to set up or contrive an opportunity to observe your teen. If your teen is sensitive to being watched, consider video recording or using a more private setting.
Step 3 – Evaluate Level of Assistance Needed for the Skill
As you observe, the goal for the evaluation is to identify how much support or what level of assistance is required for your teen to complete the essential living skill. Rank the skill or each step of the task from the least to most support required. While every learner is different, it can be helpful to know if your teen can complete the skill with no assistance needed, with the use of visual or written instructions, verbal prompts or reminders, model prompts (“Let me show you.”), or with physical guidance. If your teen resists the skill or you experience challenging behavior during the observation, mark that as well.
For logging an observation of your teen’s essential living skills, use our free .pdf downloadable worksheet.
Step 4 – Observe again, if needed
After observing the skill, you may decide that a second or third observation is necessary to gather more information. We all have “off days,” so it’s best to decide if what you recorded data on is an accurate reflection of your teen’s typical performance. If it’s not the best day, set up another opportunity to gather more information.
Don’t Forget Motivation
One final thing worth noting when evaluating your teen’s essential living skills. Don’t underestimate how motivation can change behavior. Many of our teens with diverse learning needs can complete DLS skills but lack the motivation to do them without adult support. Evaluating how much assistance your teen needs should also include assessing whether your teen meets a skill under ‘natural contingencies’ or without external rewards or motivators. If your teen needs those extra motivators to succeed right now, observe what works and what doesn’t to motivate them. Finally, if you experience challenging behavior or resistance to an essential living skill during observation, brainstorm ways to boost motivation along the way.
Further Reading
- Life Skills Advocate – 6 Key Steps for Making Values-Based Decisions For Your Child’s Daily Living Skills
- Life Skills Advocate – The Trouble with Standardized Daily Living Skills Assessments
- Sandercock, R. K., Lamarche, E. M., Klinger, M. R., & Klinger, L. G. (2020). Assessing the convergence of self-report and informant measures for adults with autism spectrum disorder. Autism, 24(8), 2256–2268. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320942981