What Does Teaching Declaratives Tell Us About the Criteria by Which we Can Judge the Developmental Importance of Treatment Outcomes?

This paper uses examples of treatment research on declaratives to illustrate criteria for determining whether a taught behavior is a "skill", not just a context-bound behavior and whether the taught skill has associations with other theoretically linked skills as one type of validation evidence. The paper uses data from three treatment studies to illustrate the issues and proposed criteria. The paper concludes with a call to consumers and producers of treatment research to use the criteria to judge the developmental importance of treatment outcomes.