Description of the Strategy

Supporting students with problem behaviors, particularly intense or chronic behaviors, remains a primary concern for practitioners, teachers, parents, and researchers. Functional behavioral assessment is a strategy designed to assist school personnel in collecting information about a student's behavior through direct observation, interviews, and archival records. The information gathered from a functional behavioral assessment is summarized in a testable hypothesis or a summary statement that identifies (a) the antecedents (discriminative stimuli [SDs] and establishing operations [EOs]) that establish the problem behavior, (b) an operational description of the problem behavior, and (c) the maintaining consequence. Developing a testable hypothesis allows behavior to be considered within its environmental context. Following a structured format that organizes assessment information facilitates the development of individualized, ...