Putting the "Fun" in Functional Behavior Assessment: Preschool Level

Time: 2 hours

Intended Audience: Pre-K Teachers (General and Special Education)

Short Description:

·      This presentation will show what data need to be collected to do an effective intervention plan using a competing pathway model. This uses a real preschool student and 10 days of data. Dr. Riffel will show how she takes the information from the functional behavior assessment (FBA) and turns it into a data-based intervention plan.

Long Description:

·      Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) is an open-ended term because there is not a legal definition of what an FBA should entail. Therefore, some schools feel answering 20 questions about a student, an observer sitting in the back of the room for 30 minutes, or anecdotal notes is sufficient to determine the real function of the behavior. To have a good FBA, we need to know the triggers and the impacts of the targeted behavior in conjunction with each other. The consensus among researchers is that we need ten incidents to develop an effective intervention plan. Dr. Riffel prefers 10 days of data collected by the classroom teacher looking for behavioral chains. Knowing how difficult this was, she spent years simplifying a data collection tool.

·      This is a free tool that graphs antecedent, behavior, and consequence data and helps the educational behavior support team determine the true function of the behavior.

·      Dr. Riffel will show you how to use the tool to enter data, analyze the data, and write an effective competing pathway plan for remediating the behavior using a preschool example.