Strategies for Developing and Carrying Out Functional Assessment and Behavior Intervention Planning

Abstract

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 that the FBAs in schools are conducted either with such a lack of rigor and logic as to be worthless or with such complexity and formality as to be unrealistic for the typical school setting. In this article, the authors provide a framework for conducting FBAs in classroom settings in typical schools. They provide an overview of the key concepts and features of FBA, describe how educators can efficiently conduct FBA in a classroom and how the results can be used to develop an individualized function-based behavior intervention plan, and make recommendations for teachers.

Keywords:

• assessment
• behavior
• classroom
• functional
• intervention