For students with severe or complex challenging behavior, incorporating hypothesis testing as a component of functional behavior assessment (FBA) is often warranted. Several hypothesis testing strategies (i.e., functional analysis, antecedent analysis, concurrent operant analysis) can confirm whether and how features of a student's environment…

When results of descriptive functional behavior assessments (FBAs) are inconclusive, experimental analysis methods can be used to directly test hypotheses about when or why a student engages in challenging behavior. Despite growing research on practical variations of hypothesis testing in schools, these methods are rarely incorporated in FBAs in…

When results of descriptive functional behavior assessments are unclear, hypothesis testing can help school teams understand how the classroom environment affects a student's challenging behavior. This article describes two hypothesis testing strategies that can be used in classroom settings: structural analysis and functional analysis. For each…

Functional assessment and functional analysis are processes that have been applied successfully in work with people who have developmental disabilities, but they have been used rarely with students who experience emotional or behavioral disorders. In the present study, five students in elementary school programs for severe emotional disturbance…

Functional behavioral assessment (FBA) and functional analyses (FA) are grounded in the applied behavior analysis principle that posits problem behavior is functionally related to the environment in which it occurs and is maintained by either providing access to reinforcing outcomes or allowing the individual to avoid or escape that which they…

Although functional analysis (FA) remains the standard for identifying the function of problem behavior for students with developmental disabilities, traditional FA procedures are typically costly in terms of time, resources, and perceived risks. Preliminary research suggests that trial-based FA may be a less costly alternative. The purpose of…

Structural behavioral assessment (SBA) involves a series of heuristic approaches similar to those used with functional behavioral assessment (FBA). It involves assessing contextual variables that precede the occurrence of a behavior. These variables have also been termed antecedents, setting events, or establishing operations. Once these variables…

Two functionally-indicated choice-making interventions were implemented by a classroom teacher to determine the effects on the percentage of task completion, accuracy, and classroom disruption for 9 sixth through eighth grade participants with emotional and behavioral disorders in a residential math classroom using a reversal design. Results…

The purpose of this case study was to determine the effectiveness of a combined intervention in remediating the social skills in a first-grader with a disorder from the autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The researcher also aimed to identify the changes observed during the intervention period. The combined intervention consisted of reading…

Using the five intervention elements described by Dunlap et al. (2006) as a guide, the authors of this article reviewed the functional behavioral assessment (FBA) and function-based intervention research of the past 17 years (1990-2007), focusing on a component analysis of FBA and function-based intervention procedures. Thirty-five studies were…

This paper presents the results of a function-based study initiated by a general education teacher to reduce a general education student's out-of-seat behavior. Procedures included direct observation, data collection, functional behavior assessment using a Functional Assessment Protocol (FAP; Schroeder, n.d.), hypothesis development, and creating…

Background: Kinship theory suggests that genomic imprinting could account for phenotypic behaviors that increase (in the case of Angelman syndrome) or decrease (for Prader-Willi syndrome) the drive to access social resources (adult contact) depending on the imprinting parent-of-origin. Difficult to manage behaviors, such as aggression that is…

This article illustrates how to (a) use schoolwide data to monitor student responsiveness to primary and secondary prevention efforts to identify students for tertiary preventions and (b) design, implement, and evaluate a function-based intervention in collaboration with two general education teachers, who served as the primary interventionists.…

Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence (A-B-C) recordings are often used in school settings as part of a functional assessment. A number of limitations are associated with A-B-C recordings, and a novel approach for describing data from A-B-C recordings is to compute conditional probabilities that can be graphed in the general operant contingency space to…

Faced with limited resources, schools require tools that increase the accuracy and efficiency of functional behavioral assessment. Yarbrough and Carr (2000) provided evidence that informant confidence ratings of the likelihood of problem behavior in specific situations offered a promising tool for predicting the accuracy of function-based…