This brief provides an overview of how to identify and determine why a student may be avoiding or refusing to attend school, and ways that schoolwide positive behavioral interventions and supports (PBIS) teams can help to assess and address school refusal. We will introduce a research-based framework to engage in problem-solving to better support…

Function-based support is a widely researched and highly effective form of intervention for students with persistent problem behavior. However, individualized behavior support practices for students continue to be implemented inconsistently in school settings, and educators often use valuable resources adopting interventions that are not likely to…

Effective behavior support is achieved through designing supportive environments. However, it is common to overlook the context of implementation when designing support for individuals. This lack of attention to the broader context (e.g., behavior of peers, school resources, capacity of family members to use recommended strategies) may lead to…

Sustainability of effective practices in schools is a critical area for research in any domain. The purpose of this article is to describe and evaluate the validity and reliability of a recently developed research instrument designed to evaluate schools' capacity to sustain school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) efforts at the universal…

In the previous article in this series, the authors provided a rationale for integrating academic and behavior response to intervention (RTI) systems. Their rationale included: (1) research showing that challenges in academic and social behavior are linked; (2) a description of the common features that both RTI systems share; and (3) the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a tier two daily behavior card intervention and differential effects based on function of problem behavior. The participants were 36 elementary school students nominated for additional intervention beyond universal School-Wide Positive Behavior Support. Measures included…

This article discusses the evidence for intervention validity of Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) in designing support for students with intensive behavioral needs. Since its inclusion into the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act nearly a decade ago, FBA has been the subject of significant research investigating its use and…

Functional behavior assessment and function-based support have increasingly been used in school settings in the past decade. This increased use has come under scrutiny from some experts who have argued in the past that function-based support has not yet been proven to be effective in typical school settings with students without severe…

With the recent increase in the use of functional behavior assessment (FBA) in school settings, there has been an emphasis in practice on the development and use of effective, efficient methods of conducting FBAs, particularly indirect assessment tools such as interviews. There are both benefits and drawbacks to these tools, and their technical…

The authors examined the relation between variables maintaining problem behavior and reading performance for elementary-age students. Participants were 51 students in Grades 4, 5, and 6 who had received two or more office discipline referrals in 2003-2004. Students were grouped by teacher-indicated function of problem behavior. The prevalence of…