We don't integrate these assessments. We build them.
ABA MTD is made by Data Makes The Difference, the team behind the official VB-MAPP App for Dr. Mark Sundberg and the Essential for Living App for Dr. Patrick McGreevy and Troy Fry. If you have scored a VB-MAPP on a tablet in the last decade, you have used something we made. That same scoring runs inside ABA MTD.
Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program
By Dr. Mark L. Sundberg
vbmappapp.com(opens in a new tab)The VB-MAPP is built on B. F. Skinner's analysis of verbal behavior and on typical developmental milestones. Rather than producing a score you file away, it produces a profile: what a learner can already do, what is getting in the way, and where teaching should start.
It has become one of the most widely used criterion-referenced assessments in ABA, and for a lot of practices it is the assessment the whole programme hangs off.
Children with autism or other language delays, where the question is which verbal operants are in place and what to teach next.
- 1Milestones Assessment across three developmental levels
- 2Barriers Assessment, for what is blocking progress
- 3Transition Assessment, for placement decisions
- 4Task Analysis and Skills Tracking
- 5Placement and IEP goal recommendations
Scored per learner and charted across administrations, so growth between assessments is something you can show a parent rather than describe. The milestones you mark feed straight into the programmes and targets you write next.
A Communication, Behavior, and Functional Skills Curriculum, Assessment, and Teaching Manual
By Dr. Patrick McGreevy and Troy Fry
eflapp.com(opens in a new tab)Essential for Living starts from a different question. Not "where is this learner developmentally", but "what does this person need in order to get through a day, and what happens if they never learn it".
That makes it the right instrument for a large group of learners who fall outside a milestones-based assessment entirely: adults, learners with limited vocal behaviour, and anyone whose priority is functional independence rather than developmental catch-up.
Children and adults with moderate to severe disabilities, including the older learners the VB-MAPP was never designed to cover.
- 1The Essential Eight, the skills prioritised above all others
- 2Assessment of speaker, listener and functional skills
- 3A curriculum and teaching manual, not just a score sheet
- 4Designed to run across the whole lifespan
Its own scoring rules, honoured properly. Prompt codes in Essential for Living do not mean what they mean elsewhere, so the app treats them as their own system rather than flattening them into a generic scale.
A Self-Monitoring and Matching System
By Jamie Salter and Dr. Katharine Croce
selfandmatchapp.com(opens in a new tab)Self & Match is a systematic self-monitoring intervention with one addition that changes everything about it: matching. The learner rates their own behaviour against agreed criteria, an adult rates it independently, and then the two compare.
Agreement is what gets reinforced. That is what moves a learner from being managed by someone else's contingencies toward accurately noticing their own behaviour, which is the point of the whole exercise.
Learners who are ready to take part in managing their own behaviour, in classrooms and clinics alike.
- 1Learner self-evaluation against agreed criteria
- 2Independent adult evaluation of the same interval
- 3A matching step, where agreement is what earns reinforcement
- 4Built for classrooms as much as clinics
In development. It will sit alongside the other two, using the same learner record, so self-monitoring data lands next to the programme data rather than in a separate binder.
An assessment should decide what you teach on Monday
Scored in a separate app, an assessment becomes a PDF someone files. Scored here, the milestones you mark are the starting point for the programmes you write, the targets your RBTs run, and the progress report at the end of the authorisation period. Same assessment, one less gap for it to fall down.
See what it connects toQuestions
About licensing, and about which one fits which learner.
Are these the real assessments, or your version of them?+
The real ones. We build and maintain the official VB-MAPP and Essential for Living apps on behalf of their authors, and the scoring inside ABA MTD is that same work rather than a reimplementation of it.
Do I need a licence for the assessment itself?+
Yes. These are published instruments and the licence belongs to their authors and publishers, not to us. That is why assessment access is a paid add-on rather than something bundled into a seat: we are not in a position to give away someone else's work.
Which one should I be using?+
It depends on the learner, and plenty of practices use both. The VB-MAPP is a developmental milestones assessment for children with language delays. Essential for Living is a functional skills curriculum for children and adults with moderate to severe disabilities. They are not competing versions of the same idea.
What happens to an assessment once I've scored it?+
It stops being a document. Scores are charted across administrations so progress is visible, and they feed the programmes and targets your team runs day to day. That link is the reason to score it here rather than anywhere else.
Score your next one here
Set up your practice, add a learner, and run the assessment you were going to run anyway. The difference is what happens to it afterwards.