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Functional Behavioral Assessment

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IDEA 1997 requires that schools perform functional behavioral assessments on special education students who have behaviors that significantly impact their education.(Federal Register/Vol 62, No.204 pg. 55102).  Although ill defined by the law, most experts agree that a Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA) looks at antecedents that may contribute to student behaviors and consequences that may reinforce student behavior.  The !Observe software is well suited for just such a task.  The !Observe is not a simple checklist that provides quick and meaningless data.  It is an important tool to help the school psychologist use her/his clinical skills most efficiently.  When you buy the !Observe, two templates are pre-loaded onto your software that are specifically designed for FBA.  Below is a demonstration of the use of those templates in a typical situation.

Sherrie has been hearing about John's problem behaviors since he came to her school.  Various teachers have reported that John is; off task, verbally disruptive, oppositional and non-compliant.  All of John's teachers say that his behavior seems to be erratic, some days he does well and other days he takes up all of the teachers attention and focus.  When John transferred into Sherries school from a strict religious school last year there were no records of behavior problems.  John has been made a focus of concern and Sherrie has decided to do a functional behavioral assessment as part of her evaluation.

The first thing Sherrie did was to conduct extensive interviews of John's teachers in a lunchtime conference in her office.  As the pizza box was passed around the table several interesting clues concerning John's behavior patterns emerged in the conversation.  Two teachers said that John's behavior problems have been greatly reduced since they moved John next to their classroom aides.  Even then John will have problems when asked to do independent work.  Another teacher said that he dreaded the small group discussion part of his class as he could be sure that John would cause problems then.  All of John's teachers said that he was most likely to do work when he had worksheet to do and an adult nearby.  From this lunchtime conference Sherrie developed a plan for looking at John's behavior and told the teachers that she would be in and out of their classrooms several times over the next few weeks.

Sherrie developed two templates for this FBA.  The first, which she called FBA: antecedents, looked at the four most often mentioned problem behaviors in three possible classroom conditions: structured time, unstructured time, and one on one instruction.  When she had finished with the template (it took her about 7 minutes to finish it) it looked like this:

Armed with this template Sherrie headed into John's classrooms and took data once a day, in a different setting, for three days.  During the observation Sherrie would look up at John every three seconds and click the appropriate behavior button.  It was a bit harder than a "normal" observation as she had to look not only at the behavior but the context where the behavior occurred.  After she finished the last observation she clicked John's name, the <All Sessions> option under Date/Time, and the Summarize button.  This is what appeared on her screen:

She then clicked the Options button and changed "sort by category" to "sort by class" and then hit the OK button.  When she returned to the Summary screen it had changed to this:

After she had looked at both screens she simply clicked the Output button and printed out both summaries.  Sherrie felt it was easier to compare the two summaries when they were right in front of her on paper.  After looking at them and doing a little work with her calculator she had come up some figures and wrote this in her notes:

When in a highly structured environment John displayed appropriate behavior 98% of the time.  When receiving one on one instruction he displayed appropriate behavior 85% of the time.  And when in an unstructured environment he displayed appropriate behavior 8.5% of the time.  She took the time to list the behaviors she was classifying as appropriate and inappropriate and the classroom environments she considered structured, unstructured and one on one.

It was clear to Sherrie when John was displaying inappropriate behaviors but she was still a bit unclear as to why.  She then put together a FBA:reinforcement template on her !Observe software.  This template listed the same behaviors used in the antecedent template.  However, instead of looking at when the behaviors occurred, Sherrie looked at what happened after they occurred.  She wanted to see if John was being reinforced (by attention from peers or teaches), ignored, or punished for each of the behaviors.  So, behind each of the behaviors she had looked at she put either a +, -, or 0.  During the reinforcement observations when she looked at what John was doing she also looked at what was occurring to John while he was displaying the behavior and clicked the appropriate button.  Her template looked like this:

Again Sherrie took data on John on three occasions.  When she summarized her data and studied it a bit she wrote the following statement in her notes:

When John displays inappropriate behaviors such as non-compliance, verbal disruptions, off task behavior, or oppositional behavior, he is positively reinforced 43 % of the time (usually through attention from peers or teachers), ignored 47% of the time, and punished or receives negative consequences (time out, loss of class money, etc.) 10% of the time.  When he displays appropriate behaviors such as compliance or on task behavior he is positively reinforced 25% of the time, ignored 75% of the time, and not give negative consequences.

Sherrie now had the data necessary to produce a full functional behavioral assessment.  She could clearly state that John functions best in highly structured environments.  He does well in one on one situations but tends toward more oppositional behavior when he has the full attention of a staff member and behaves inappropriately most of the time in unstructured classroom environments.  She could also say that his teachers were unintentionally stopping appropriate behaviors by ignoring him when he is appropriate much more than they did when he was not appropriate.  In fact, teachers may be unintentionally encouraging his inappropriate behavior by paying much more attention to him when he was acting inappropriately.

Armed with the powerful statements contained in the FBA, Sherrie had a much easier time that usual working with the teachers to modify classroom structure.  The FBA also provided most of the goals and objectives for John's first IEP after he was qualified for special education services.  She also realized that each template (antecedents and reinforcement) could be useful in and of itself for teacher consultation.