"People do not engage in self-injury [or] aggression...solely because they have...developmental disabilities. There is logic to their behaviour, and functional assessment is an attempt to understand that logic"-O’Neill, Horner, Albin, Sprague, Storey, and Newton, 1997 in Cosgrave (n.d.)
I think some people understand and accept this to be true and some people just see the behaviour and try to penalize it without trying to understand it. Many of the EAs at my school are firm believers of this, and I think with the help of the principal, who was also an EA once in his career, things could change. There is a group of colleagues that went to the Learning in the Brain Conference in San Francisco this year, and it really brought a lot of these ideas to the forefront for us. I think we are moving in the right direction with our thinking and trying to really understand our students and their wants and needs.
Direct observation- someone observes the student in a natural environment and takes notes on what the student is doing before and after the behavior and tries to perceive potential cause. It’s used to hypothesize behavior.
Informant methods-uses interviews and questionnaires completed by parents, teachers, SSAs, etc, to identify what happened before and after behavior to find out the cause of the behaviour
Functional analysis: practitioners changing what happens before or after behavior to test what might be causing the behavior
Descriptive Vs. Experimental
Both information and observant are descriptive -these two only provide correlational data
Only functional analysis can truly identify the function of behavior
Manipulating the before or after during a functional analysis can increase or decrease behavior helping pinpoint function
FBA brings clarity to confusing situations
All behavior has a function (getting a child attention, getting them out of academic work, etc.) and an FA allows everyone involved to understand that.
Cautions of FBAs
They may be unethical to use functional analysis to manipulate student into increased behaviour (self-injury etc) -potential risks must be considered
Behaviours may be occurring due to medical or physical illness, so these need to be ruled out first.
Assessment Gathers information -it’s an information-gathering process
Miltenberger lists 7 categories of information collected:
Clear description of challenging behavior
Records the antecedent, the environment and everything happening within it BEFORE the behaviour takes place such as what others in the environment are doing
Records the consequence, the environment and behaviours of people in it AFTER the behaviour takes place
The ID of desirable behaviors the child can already engage in -they may be used to compete with the behavior. For instance if a child can make a request then they could be taught to say please go away instead of screaming
The identification of events or people in the environment that are creating extra motivation for the challenging behaviour. For instance, one staff member could be forgetting to give a child their favourite toy over lunch time
Development of hypothesis outlining potential function of behavior
A full history of interventions that have previously been used, successes and failures
Image courtesy of SD 41 Blog
Podcast: Functional Behavior Assessments by A. Kelly
Notes:
-FBA problem-solving process addressing areas of concern and look beyond diagnostic labels in order to obtain information that can maximize the effectiveness of behavioral supports we have.
-We want to obtain info on where behaviors are concerning in order to understand why they are happening
-In US IDEA, the use of positive interventions and support must be used if behaviors impedes learning of child or others
FBA key components complete when 3 outcomes achieved
observable , measurable, and operationally clearly defined behaviors of concern -we must be able to observe it and measure it in order to know if it has changed
ID of the events and situations that will predict if behavior is more or less likely to occur ex. Behaviour less likely to occur when student is doing preferred activity in the classroom and more likely to occur when unstructured time
ID of the function behaviors appear to serve as well as matched replacement behaviours. Need to find out the reason a behaviour is occurring and build the skill deficit ultimately replacing the behaviour
Interesting fact: FBA needs written consent from caregivers, review of permanent records, interview with clients, caretakers and teachers.
Make sure that the FBA is completed by person with qualifications and signed by that person
-a school team works on an FBA and the FBA is led by someone trained in behavior (school psychologist or behavior specialist)
-FBA team may include: teachers, admin, specialist, and students family)
Steps of FBA:
1.Define the behavior (that is challenging, disruptive, destructive, etc.)
2. Gather and analyze information- the team works together going through data (interviews, etc) to find out :
When and where is the behavior taking place?
Where is the behavior NOT taking place?
How often is it happening?
Who is present when it happens?
What takes place immediately before and after the behavior?
*students can help with this too
3. Find out the reason for the behavior
4. Make a plan -Behavior intervention plan might be used to reward positive behavior changes
Two situations where students get FBAs are: 1) a student has exceptionalities behavior is interfering with learning or student has an IEP and new behaviors are causing concern 2) federal law requires an FBA when a student is disciplined or removed from school in the US (I'm unsure of whether or not this happens in Canada)
The understood team. (n.d.). Functional assessment: what it is and how it works. Retrieved June 01, 2020, from https://www.understood.org/en/school-learning/evaluations/evaluation-basics/functional-assessment-what-it-is-and-how-it-works
The research sounds like it follows protocol at my school along with RTI, but I haven’t ever seen an FBA implemented. I wonder how it would look in my school and how severe behavior would have to be before the SBT would take action to perform an FBA. I also wonder if FBAs are also requirements in Canada as they are in the US. I think the outline for an FBA seems very straightforward in identifying the function of behavior, but I do wonder what follows the process once the function has been identified and what that looks like. I have no experience in this area but from what I can tell of an on-going situation in my school where the behaviour of a student has been a threat to other students’ safety, the process of changing behavior may be more challenging than identifying the function of the behaviour.
Tools and Resources:
http://blogs.sd41.bc.ca/lss/resource-centre/behaviour-support/ Describes the process in BC's context, has forms for documentation, includes positive behaviour support forms and strategies for implementation, and more.
http://theautismhelper.com/take-great-abc-data/ This site has a selection of data tracking templates that may be useful.
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