Teaching Elementary School Educators to Design, Implement, and Evaluate Functional Assessment-Based Interventions: Successes and Challenges

Abstract

In this article, the authors present the findings of an intensive training series designed to train school-site teams in functional assessment procedures. They examined the extent to which participation in an intensive training series that included on-site follow-up was sufficient to provide participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to design, implement, and evaluate a function-based intervention. The resulting interventions included the core components necessary (e.g., social validity, treatment integrity, and generalization and maintenance) to draw accurate conclusions about intervention outcome. The results of the study indicate that two teams were able to decrease problem behaviors and increase the use of functionally equivalent replacement behaviors. The authors discuss several limitations regarding the present study and provide thoughts on future efforts in this area.

Keywords:

• function-based interventions
• social validity
• treatment integrity