The authors report outcomes for 4,777 youth served by the public mental health system in Michigan who had problems in school, at home, in interpersonal relationships, or in modulating their mood. Cluster analysis identified five subgroups: Pervasive Problems with Mood Disturbance (i.e., severe or moderate impairment in school, at home, in behavior…

Although individuals may engage in several topographies of aberrant behavior, each with different functions, it is not uncommon for researchers to conduct one functional analysis. We conducted two functional analyses for a child with autism, one with and one without consequences for stereotypic vocalizations. Only the analysis without consequences…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) 2004 permits the use of a process, Response to Intervention (RTI), based on a child's response to scientific, research-based intervention in the evaluation of students suspected of having specific learning disabilities. Many school districts throughout the country are working to incorporate…

The American Bar Association-American Psychological Association (ABA-APA) Working Group on the Assessment of Capacity in Older Adults was established in 2003 under the auspices of the Task Force on Facilitating ABA-APA Relations. This handbook is designed for psychologists evaluating civil capacities of older adults. Contemporary probate law…

Problem behavior is a major barrier to successful community integration for people with developmental disabilities. Recently, there has been increased interest in identifying contextual factors involving setting events and discriminative stimuli that impact the display of problem behavior. The authors previously developed the "Contextual…

What scope is there for teachers to purposefully deviate from their routine classroom practice in order to respond to disengaging students? A case study of a small provincial school in Australia shows an example of alternative pedagogy used in response to a disengaged group of young adolescents. The students temporarily engaged with a different…

Behavioral interventions based on operant principles are commonly attempted to manage agitation in older adults with dementia. The extent to which operant conditioning can occur in persons with particular dementias, however, is unclear. The present study involved use of a button-pressing task to evaluate the sensitivity of the responding of older…

In individual behavior therapy two clients were evaluated using behavior categories created by the therapist. Both clients were observed to improve in terms of social competence. One demonstrated a significant inverse correlation between improvement of social competence and weight loss during treatment (16 sessions) and lost weight. The other…

Although functional assessment-based interventions have produced desired outcomes in student behavior in applied settings, most of those interventions involved strong, sustained participation with researchers in intervention design, implementation, and assessment. In this article, we describe a systematic approach to designing, implementing, and…

The current investigation assessed the effectiveness of protective equipment, specifically arm splints, in reducing the occurrence of severe self-injurious behavior (SIB). Although the protective equipment reduced rates of SIB to near-zero levels, self-restraint subsequently emerged. In an attempt to reduce self-restraint while maintaining…

In the United States, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) mandates functional assessment based behavioral support plans for all students with disabilities who display challenging behavior. However, very few studies have been undertaken to examine the effectiveness of the functional assessment-based behavioral plans with high…

Resurgence refers to the recovery of previously extinguished responding when a recently reinforced response is extinguished. Although the topic of resurgence has received limited experimental attention, there recently have been an increased number of investigations involving the topic. This increased experimental attention also has been…

Research has shown a positive correlation between time spent on homework and learning. However, students often engage in off-task behaviors to escape the demands of homework. Youth with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD) are especially likely to engage in off-task behaviors. Effective interventions to increase on-task behavior during homework…

This study produced a second replication of an investigation of the effects of a multicomponent cognitive-behavioral intervention on the challenging behavior of young children with growing behavioral concerns after traumatic brain injury (TBI). The participants were two young elementary-age children with escalating behavior problems after severe…

This article examines the case of Laura, a 9-year-old Mexican immigrant who officially "failed to learn English" in an American school. It may be more accurate to say that schooling failed Laura, and in ways that went beyond language learning. This diagnosis of failure is criticized, along with the individualistic and essentialist assumptions…