While functional behavior assessment (FBA) has been a part of special education law and embedded in Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) since 1997, a precise definition of what actions or processes constitute a legal FBA has never been adequately addressed in the law. This article provides an overview of the underlying logic of FBA…

Teachers report that students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) present challenges that are among the greatest they face on a daily basis. Research, however, clearly shows that teachers routinely receive little or no training in how to effectively work with students with challenging behaviors. This is particularly frustrating when…

This article is a review of functional behavior assessment studies in general education setting for students with emotional and behavioral disorders. The studies were assessed in accordance with published standards for evidence-based practices. Overall, few studies met criteria for inclusion in this review and even fewer studies included all three…

Acting-out behavior by students manifests in ways that make classroom management and academic success very challenging. In this time- and field-tested resource, Colvin and Scott present a system for understanding acting-out behavior in terms of seven phases and correcting it before it gets in the way of student engagement and learning. The newly…

The use of functional behavioral assessment (FBA) is an effective tool to address a wide range of severe behavior problems of students at risk for or with emotional disabilities (ED). However, the transformation of a procedure proven effective under highly-controlled clinical conditions to a practical and effective strategy for use in applied…

Students in alternative, residential, and correctional settings present challenges in the classroom and facility due to the complexity and intensity of their behaviors. In addition, the factors typically associated with these settings including crowding, inconsistency, and conflicting staff perspectives on education and discipline present…

Functional behavior assessment (FBA), although mandated by federal law in situations involving students with emotional and behavioral disorders, is not well defined in the literature in terms of how it should best be undertaken in widespread practice in schools. Functional behavior assessment can be defined as a process for determining the reason…

Although the conceptual foundations of PBS at the universal level have been widely described and presented in the literature, secondary and tertiary interventions have been presented through very limited examples. This paper defines the key features of secondary and tertiary interventions and presents a decision-making process to guide schools…

Although the federal government recently mandated the use of functional behavior assessment (FBA) and positive behavioral interventions for students, this legislation has not defined the key features of FBA and has provided little guidance for how such procedures should be completed in a public school setting. As a result, recent evidence suggests…

Although FBA has been a familiar term to those in special education for over 30 years, its formal inclusion into IDEA is relatively recent. Currently, agreement as to the nature, context, and application of the FBA process is, at best, confusing and, at worst, inadequate to direct elective practice in schools. An analysis of the issues that define…

Functional behavioral assessment (FBA) was developed and researched in clinical settings as an effective strategy to identify interventions that both manage inappropriate behavior and teach appropriate replacement behavior, but is it equally effective in school settings, which typically involve much less structure and much greater social…

Functional behavior assessment (FBA) is an integral component of a positive behavior support approach to preventing problem behavior across all students in the school. As primary prevention, FBA is a collaborative school-wide practice to predict common problems and to develop school-wide interventions. As secondary prevention, FBA involves simple…

This article presents a detailed example of how faculty and staff at one middle school implemented team-based functional behavioral assessment (FBA) planning procedures with a student exhibiting recurring minor problems. Insets list tasks and considerations for an FBA, a sample formatted antecedent-behavior-consequence summary of team member…

Although functional behavior assessment (FBA) has been widely recognized as a promising practice for providing proactive interventions with students exhibiting challenging behaviors in typical schools, questions persist as to how FBA should best be trained and used in such public settings. Debate has balanced the issue of what is practical for…

This article presents three case studies of elementary students with learning disabilities whose behavior interfered with the quantity and quality of their classroom instruction. In each case, interventions involved teaching and reinforcing specific replacement behaviors that were identified through functional behavioral assessment. (Contains…