Background: Interventions based on applied behaviour analysis (ABA) are commonly recommended for children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD); however, few studies address how this intervention model impacts families. The intense requirements that ABA programmes place on children and families are often cited as a critique of the programme,…

The study describes an initiative to increase retention at a 2-year college in the Northeast United States. The process involved a collaborative, intrusive advising approach to intervene with students at-risk for academic failure or experiencing difficulty with the transition to the college. Components of the mixed-method design included…

This chapter examines problem and pathological gambling among college students and reports on prevalence rate, risk and protective factors, prevention and intervention, and recommendations for college student personnel and other university administrators.

This study was conducted to examine the effects of functional communication training when used by mothers to address the serious challenging behaviors of toddlers. Multiple baseline (across home routines) designs were used with two mother-child dyads. The data showed mothers used the procedures correctly and interventions produced reductions in…

Fiona was a 14-year-old 7th-grader whose academic history, frequent behavior problems, and low levels of academic engagement put her at-risk for academic failure. This study's purpose was to examine the effectiveness of a systematic process for identifying the function of her problem behaviors and designing interventions that directly addressed…

Access to public community job-training sites can be restricted if students with moderate mental retardation exhibit behavior unacceptable to nondisabled coworkers or the general public. The authors conducted a functional behavioral assessment (FBA) in public community settings to determine the function of each student's problem behavior. They…

A descriptive study of 22 students (K-10th grade) with emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD) who were referred for functional behavioral assessment (FBA) revealed less on-task and more avoidant and inappropriate behaviors in comparison to classroom peers without EBD. Students who had been diagnosed as having attention-deficit/hyperactivity…

This study investigated the interactive effects of friend deviance and reward dominance on the development of externalizing behavior of adolescents in the Child Development Project. Reward dominance was assessed at age 16 by performance on a computer-presented card-playing game in which participants had the choice of either continuing or…

Teaching strategies that work for typically developing children often do not work for those diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. However, teaching strategies that work for children with autism do work for typically developing children. In this article, the author explains how the principles and concepts of Applied Behavior Analysis can be…

In the current study, nursing home staff were taught to administer functional analyses to determine the variables maintaining aggression by an elder with dementia. The results indicated that aggression was evoked during bathroom routines and that escape maintained aggression. Staff then reduced aggression to near-zero levels with noncontingent…

School refusal behavior refers to child-motivated refusal to attend school and/or difficulty attending classes for an entire day (Kearney & Silverman, 1996). As such, the term represents an umbrella construct for many historical ones that have been used to describe youths with problematic absenteeism, including truancy, psychoneurotic truancy,…

In this field-based study, functional behavior assessment was incorporated into the student assistance team (SAT) process. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine whether team members could identify the correct function of behavior by selecting related interventions. Further, the extent to which FBA information collected at each stage…

Although functional behavioral assessments (FBA) have long been considered "best practice" in the field of applied behavior analysis, their use by school psychologists has a much briefer history. To assist school psychologists in becoming better acquainted with FBA, this article overviews the conceptual foundations and underlying principles of FBA…

Argues that using functional behavioral assessment (FBA) to identify individual factors that may be contributing to a student's behavior problem and building a positive behavioral-intervention plan will produce effective disciplinary practices. Components of successful implementation of FBA and overarching challenges to the use of FBA are…

This response to a paper (EC 624 771) on the early development of stereotyped and self-injurious behavior in infants and young children considers reasons why such behaviors are maintained in some individuals. The use of functional behavioral assessment suggests these behaviors are influenced by environmental factors including attention, escape, or…