Functional Behavioral Assessment

As Mentioned in the Glasberg book and the video by  St Clair County Resa, Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) is the most important tool when dealing with students with ASD.  There are four steps to be consider when doing an assessment. 1) Functional Behavior Assessment 2) Behavior Intervention Plan 3) Data Tracking and  4) Objective Modification Base on Data.  It is extremely important to describe  what the behavior might be and most importantly what the behavior looks like.  Be specific because you want other people to be able to read and follow the plan.  Always form a team when attempting to create a behavior plan.   The team could include, parents, teachers, nurse, OT, speech pathology, bus driver, lunch monitor and anyone else who comes in contact with the child. Most importantly the child himself or herself should be part of the process.  Many times the team forgets to get the child input which could solve the problem quicker.

It is important for the team to know what is the behavior is trying to communicate.  The child might hit others because she gets her classmate attention or that is her way of saying I want to play. Remember the behavior should be specific, observable and measurable.  Once the team determine the reason they will be able to come up with a plan to help the child communicate more appropriately.  Always remember that a student might have many behaviors.  The team should target the 3 most disruptive behaviors at a time.  As behaviorist we know there are a lot of work involve when targeting 1 behavior let alone 3.  The team needs to have enough time to monitor the behavior and not cutting corner because the have too many behaviors to work on at once.  According to Resa "if taking away a problematic behavior, it will needs to be replace by an appropriate behavior".

Once the plan is in place data should be collected in order for the team to determine if the behavior plan is working.  If the plan is effective a decrease in behavior should occur within weeks.  In order to show that, the team needs to have concrete data to back up their statement. We should always keep in mind the plan might not work in the first try, we might need to go back several times to make changes.  In the summary/ hypothesis the team should list the finding of the FBA and what is causing the student to misbehave.