How to Write a Pinpoint+ for the Standard Celeration Chart

Every Standard Celeration Chart starts with one decision: what exactly are you going to count? Get it right, and the chart becomes a clear record of learning that anyone on your team can read. Get it wrong, and you end up with dots that don’t mean the same thing from one day, or one staff member, to the next.

In Precision Teaching, that decision is called the pinpoint. This guide walks through the Pinpoint+ framework: what it is, how to write one, and how to turn the data you’re already collecting (tallies, percent correct, duration, latency) into something you can chart. If you’re new to the chart itself, start with What is the Standard Celeration Chart? and come back.

Why the Chart Needs a Pinpoint

The SCC plots count per minute: how many times something happened, divided by how long you watched. That only works if the “something” can actually be counted. “Reading,” “aggression,” and “on-task behavior” are labels for big categories, not things you can tally one at a time. Two people watching the same session can come away with very different numbers, and the chart can’t tell you which one is right.

If you work in ABA, you already write operational definitions to solve this problem. A pinpoint does the same job in far fewer words. Compare a typical definition of self-injury, a sentence or two listing body parts, force, and exceptions, with a pinpoint like “bites own hand.” The short version is easier to hold in mind during a busy session, and research backs that up: when Kubina and colleagues (2024) compared the two, professionals missed fewer instances of a behavior when they worked from a pinpoint than when they worked from an operational definition.

From Goal to Pinpoint+

Pinpoints don’t replace the goals and objectives you already write. They sit at the end of the same chain, getting more precise at each step:

1. Goal: a general statement of the change you want. “Improve math facts.”
2. Behavioral objective: who will do what, under which conditions, to what criterion. “Given a worksheet of single-digit addition facts, the learner will write answers at 40 correct per minute with 2 or fewer errors per minute for 3 consecutive days.”
3. Pinpoint+: the short label you actually count and chart. “See-Write writes answer to single-digit addition fact on worksheet.”

Notice that the criterion in that objective is a frequency, not a percentage. “90% accuracy” says nothing about time: it could take five minutes or fifty. A frequency criterion describes what fluent performance looks like, and it’s something you can plot as an aim on the chart.

A Pinpoint+ has three parts:

We’ll take them one at a time.

Part 1: The Movement Cycle

The heart of every pinpoint is a movement cycle: one countable action with a clear beginning and a clear end. You build it from two pieces:

• An action verb in the simple present tense, ending in -s: writes, says, touches, throws, taps, marks.
• An object that receives the action and marks where it ends: writes digit, says letter sound, throws ball.

Put them together and you get something you can count every time it happens: “writes digit,” “says letter sound,” “touches picture.” Each one starts, finishes, and can happen again right away.

Before you commit to a movement cycle, run it through three checks:

• The Dead Man’s Test. Ogden Lindsley’s rule of thumb: if a dead man could do it, it isn’t a behavior. “Sits quietly,” “doesn’t hit,” and “stays in seat” all fail. Flip them to what the person actually does: “leaves seat,” “hits peer.”
• The stranger test. Could someone who has never met the learner read your pinpoint, watch a session, and get the same count you would?
• No inner-state verbs. “Knows,” “understands,” “learns,” and “is able to” describe conclusions you draw, not actions you can see. Ask what the learner would do that tells you they know it.

Watch for -ing words. “Playing,” “studying,” and “tantrumming” name activities: stretches of time made up of many different movement cycles. You can’t count an activity the way you count a movement cycle, because there’s no single start and end to tally. To make one chartable, you have three options:

• Drop down to one movement cycle inside it. Instead of “tantrums,” count “drops to floor” or “throws object.”
• Count the steps. For a routine like handwashing, count “completes step in handwashing sequence” during a timing.
• Time the whole thing. When the length of the activity is what matters, you can chart the time itself. We’ll cover how below.

Part 2: The Learning Channel

The “+” in Pinpoint+ is the learning channel: how information reaches the learner (the input) and how they respond (the output). It’s written as the input and output joined by a dash, in front of the movement cycle: See-Say says letter sound.

Common inputs include See, Hear, Touch, Feel, and Free (no prompt at all, as when the learner responds from memory). Common outputs include Say, Write, Mark, Select, Do, and Tap. A few pairs you’ll use constantly:

• See-Say: reads words aloud, names pictures.
• See-Write: solves math problems on paper, copies text.
• Hear-Write: spells words to dictation.
• Hear-Say: answers questions aloud, repeats a model.
• See-Mark: circles answers, completes multiple choice.
• Free-Say: names items from memory, with no picture or prompt.

Why bother? Because the same content in a different channel is a different skill. A learner who reads sight words fluently (See-Say) may not be able to spell them from dictation (Hear-Write). Those belong on separate targets. If you switch channels partway along one line, the chart can no longer tell you whether the learner improved or the task just changed.

Channels matter most for academic and skill-building targets. For many behaviors you want to decrease, the movement cycle and context are enough on their own: “bites own hand” doesn’t need a channel. And the system isn’t limited to what other people can see. Precision Teachers also pinpoint inner behavior, like an urge or a thought, which the learner counts for themselves (“Feel-Mark marks urge on counter”).

The learning channel system comes from Eric Haughton’s work (1980) and was later refined by Kubina and Cooper (2000).

Part 3: Context

The last piece describes the circumstances the count belongs to. Context usually answers one of four questions:

• Where? “…at the kitchen table,” “…in the hallway.”
• When? “…during morning group,” “…during transitions.”
• With whom? “…with a peer,” “…to an adult.”
• With what? “…from grade 1 word list,” “…on a 20-problem worksheet.”

Context is what keeps Tuesday’s count comparable to Friday’s. If the word list gets harder or the setting changes, the numbers can shift for reasons that have nothing to do with learning. When that happens, keep the chart going but draw a phase change line with a short label saying what changed.

One more thing goes with every count, even though it isn’t part of the label: the calendar day and how long you watched. A “session” isn’t a unit of time, because sessions vary in length, so record the actual minutes. That observation time sets the record floor, the lowest frequency you could have recorded.

Put all three parts together and you get a complete Pinpoint+: See-Say (channel) says CVC word (movement cycle) from grade 1 list (context).

How to Write a Pinpoint+, Step by Step

1. Start with the concern in plain words. “The learner is struggling with reading.” “The learner hits during group.”
2. Ask what you would see or hear. If the learner were improving, what would they be doing more of, or less of?
3. Choose the verb and object. Present tense, ending in -s, with an object that marks the end: “says word.”
4. Run the checks. The Dead Man’s Test, the stranger test, a clear start and end, and able to repeat right away.
5. Add the learning channel. How does the task reach the learner, and how do they respond? “See-Say says word.”
6. Add the context. “See-Say says word from grade 1 passage.”
7. Choose a direction. Is this a behavior to increase (charted with a dot) or to decrease (charted with an X)?

Here’s what that looks like for some common targets:

Notice that “off-task” turns into something to increase. Counting the work you want to see is usually more useful than counting its absence.

Turning What You Measure Now Into a Pinpoint

You probably already have data. Here’s how to bring the most common kinds onto the chart.

Untimed tallies and per-session counts. This is the easiest change. You’re already counting, so just write down how long you were watching, along with the date. Frequency is the count divided by the minutes observed: six instances across a 3-hour observation is 6 ÷ 180 = 0.033 per minute, with a record floor of 1 ÷ 180 (about 0.0056 per minute). In SimpleSCC, enter the count and choose the observation length under Time spent (Custom lets you type 180 minutes), and the app does the division and draws the floor.

Percent correct and discrete trials. A percentage hides two things the chart cares about: how fast the learner responded, and how many responses there were. 80% correct could be 8 out of 10 in ten minutes or 40 out of 50 in five. To fix that, time the teaching block, then chart two targets on the same chart: corrects per minute (increase, dots) and errors per minute (decrease, X’s). Nine correct and one error in a 4-minute block is 2.25 corrects and 0.25 errors per minute.

One caveat: in trial-by-trial teaching, the instructor’s pace caps how fast the learner can go, because a learner can’t answer faster than the questions arrive. Either keep your pacing the same each day and treat it as part of the context, or switch to free-operant timings, where the learner responds as fast as they can for a set time, such as a 1-minute flashcard timing. Then rewrite the mastery criterion as a frequency aim.

Duration and latency. Start by trying to re-pinpoint. Most duration data describes an activity, so look for a movement cycle inside it (“drops to floor” instead of “minutes of tantrum”), count how many episodes start, or count the steps completed in a timing.

Sometimes the time really is the point: how long a morning routine takes, or how quickly a learner gets started after an instruction. Then you can chart the time by turning it into a frequency: 1 divided by the time in minutes. A 30-second latency becomes 1 ÷ 0.5 = 2 per minute. A 4-minute dressing routine becomes 1 ÷ 4 = 0.25 per minute. Shorter times plot higher, so chart these as targets to increase. It’s the same 1 ÷ time arithmetic the chart already uses for record floors. In SimpleSCC, enter a count of 1 and set Time spent to the elapsed time, using Custom for anything not in the list.

For behaviors you’re trying to reduce, like how long a tantrum lasts, stick with re-pinpointing. A shrinking duration would show up as a rising line, which is easy to misread on a target you want to go down.

Putting Your Pinpoint+ Into SimpleSCC

Each part of a Pinpoint+ has a home when you set up a chart in SimpleSCC:

• Chart title: the skill area, like “Math facts.”
• Behaviour counted: the full Pinpoint+ for your primary target. It’s printed on the chart as the primary target, the same spot a paper chart’s “counted” label fills.
• Target names: a short pinpoint for each target, such as “writes answer” (Increase) and “writes incorrect answer” (Decrease). These are what staff see when they enter data.
• Time spent: how long the timing or observation lasted. SimpleSCC divides the count by it and draws the record floor for you.
• Aim: the frequency criterion from your objective.
• Phase change lines: add one, with a label, whenever the context changes.

If the learning channel changes, that’s a new pinpoint. Add a new target or chart rather than a phase line.

Further Learning

Dr. Jared Van’s SCC Mastery course goes deeper on Pinpoint+, learning channels, and the measurement problems pinpoints solve. This guide draws on it.

When your pinpoints are ready, see Standard Celeration Chart symbols and conventions for how the data gets drawn, or try SimpleSCC for free and put them on a chart.

References

• Haughton, E. C. (1980). Practicing practices: Learning by activity. Journal of Precision Teaching, 1(3), 3–20.
• Kubina, R. M., Jr. (2019). The Precision Teaching implementation manual. Greatness Achieved Publishing.
• Kubina, R. M., & Cooper, J. O. (2000). Changing learning channels: An efficient strategy to facilitate instruction and learning. Intervention in School and Clinic, 35(3), 161–166.
• Kubina, R. M., Jr., Halkowski, M., Yurich, K. K. L., Ghorm, K., & Healy, N. M. (2024). Comparing the detection accuracy of operational definitions and pinpoints. Journal of Behavioral Education, 33(1), 142–162.