Functional Behavioral Assessment in Schools

Functional Behavioral Assessment in Schools

Federal law mandates the use of functional behavioral assessments and positive behavioral supports to address challenging behaviors demonstrated by students in school settings. FBA is a proactive approach to program planning and is a crucial step in providing the link to intervention based on the purpose of the student's behavior within the current environment. This article overviews the underlying principles of FBA and the methods and procedures associated with conducting FBA in the schools.

INTERVENTION IN SCHOOL AND CLINIC

Many behavior analysts viewed functional behavioral assessment and positive behavioral support as necessary procedures for effective practice in schools prior to the time these were first mandated by federal law in nineteen ninety-seven, under the amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Functional assessment is not a new concept. It has a scientifically based history with more than thirty years of research rooted in applied behavior analysis. Skinner discussed functional analysis in nineteen fifty-three in his seminal work Science and Human Behavior: Because IDEA did not provide instructions on conducting FBAs, educators have incorporated concepts from the field of applied behavior analysis to guide their practice. This article presents the purpose of FBA, discusses its underlying principles, and describes the three methods and procedures used to conduct FBAs.

FBA is a collection of methods or procedures used to obtain information about antecedents, behaviors, and consequences to determine the reason or function of the behavior. It is considered a multimethod strategy, not a single test or approach. The goal of FBA is to determine the purpose of the behavior so that appropriate interventions can be applied to decrease the problem behavior. FBA is a proactive approach to program planning and is a crucial step in providing the link to intervention based on the purpose of the student's behavior within the current environment. Interventions that are selected without the use of FBA could strengthen a problem behavior and not provide alternative reinforcement for more desirable behavior.

A basic understanding of contingencies is needed to use FBA principles for students' problem behaviors. Contingencies describe relationships among a behavior and its antecedents and consequences. Antecedents are events or stimuli that occur before the target behavior, either immediately before or at some earlier time, and may be associated with a behavior, but they do not describe the function of the behavior. An example of the A->B->C relationship follows. A request from the teacher, antecedent, is followed by student compliance, behavior, which is followed by teacher praise, consequence. According to the operant learning perspective, behaviors are a function of, maintained by, consequences that occur contingent upon those behaviors.