FBA

Evaluating the St. Clair County Assessment
I was not thrilled with the functional assessment instrument created by St Clair County RESA.  It may be helpful  for a team completing a functional assessment in a school setting but it just does not provide enough information about the behavior itself to serve as the only assessment tool.  I personally believe there should be a stronger emphasis placed on the target behavior starting with enough room to define it.
1) There should be a clear description of exactly how the behavior looks.  If the behavior is throwing would you call it an occurrence if the student you were watching dropped something on the floor?  There is no way to tell unless you have a really complete definition that lets you know exactly what you are looking for.  Two lines that tell you to describe the behavior (or behaviors) is simply not enough.
2) There should be some area on the form for the assessor to actually take some data on the behavior and a scatter plot is probably not the best way to do it.  The reason being is that scatter plots tend to look at simply frequency or one dimension.  With a variety of problem behaviors (tantrum, head banging) other aspects of the behavior such as duration or intensity may actually be more important to know than the frequency or just as important as the aspect of the behavior being graphed on the scatter plot.
3) It is really important that the behaviors and environment be represented in objective terms.  I did not hear this emphasized on the video.  How you describe the behavior is really important how you think the child is feeling is best if its not included in the assessment becasue its an assumption and it can cloud your judgeemnt as an assessor.

These problems could all be easily rectified by adding an assessment tool to the form that really looks at simply the target behavior or maybe having a few people that spend a lot of time with the student fill out the same assessment tool to see how similar there findings are about the behavior.

I also disagree with the statement the video made about having multiple target behaviors for the assessment.  Behavior is a tricky thing.  If you encounter a problem behavior with a student that is interfering with their ability to learn it is a problem.  If you encounter a few problem behaviors it is a bigger problem, and if you encounter many it is a large problem.  It is extremely important when doing functional assessments that you are analyzing a behavior.  You need to know what precedes it, what it looks like, and what its consequences are.  If you attempt to analyze more one behavior in the same assessment than you run the risk of clouding the aspects of one behavior with the aspects of another.  To better illustrate this I would like to give an example from my own personal experience.  I work with a student that engages in a couple of different maladaptive behaviors.  One behavior is defined as vocal protests the other is defined as tantrums.  They have similar topography (form, they look similar) however tantrums last longer and are often accompanied by crying.  ABC (antecedent, behavior, and consequence) data as well as assessment results suggest that the function of the vocal protests to be escape.  These behaviors have existed for the same length of time and the assessment was conducted on both behaviors at one time.  The vocal protests reduced when the child was taught he could access a break by asking for one.  So one day a tantrum occurred and in the middle of it the child asked for a hug.  He was doing a worksheet, that he insisted on completing, but clearly wanted some unnecessary help with and instead of trying to get out of doing it when i did not help him he asked for a hug.  Hugs, help, extra verbal attention during a difficult task, this screams attention but as it was a task oriented behavior and the student had other similar task oriented escape maintained behavior the treatment plan was to persist with demands (in many cases delivering more attention) and the replacement behaviors had the function of escape.  Had these behaviors been examined separately it is far more unlikely that the judgement of the team doing the assessment (which I was on by the way) wold listed an inaccurate function.  Once the treatment plan was corrected and the replacement behaviors were functional to requesting attention the tantrums nearly stopped (we still see a short occurrence about 1 time a month). 

So to wrap this up I would not choose this assessment to guide me through an FBA mainly because I do not feel like there is a strong enough emphasis on the behavioral dimensions of the behavior and that is what you are supposed to be looking at when doing these assessments. 
The following link is to an assessment tool I use with each and every problem behavior to assess its function in combination with ABC data and descriptive data about the behavior
Functional Assessment Screening Tool
I really like this tool because it asks yes and no questions specifically relating to the target behavior and then uses those to hypothesize functions.  This is not a complete assessment but I find it to be a vital tool whenever I am dealing with a problem behavior, especially because sometimes as objectively as you may be thinking your looking at a behavior you may have thoughts about it that are clouding your judgement.  Including something like this in St. Claire's assessment would be a beneficial modification along with a different form that really looks at describing the behavior.