Relevance of functional behavioral assessment research for school-based interventions and positive behavioral support.
Half of school behavior plans skip FBA and FBA presence does not promise better results.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors read every school-based study published in JABA up to 2004.
They marked whether each paper used functional behavioral assessment.
Then they checked if FBA use was linked to better student outcomes.
What they found
Half of the school studies skipped FBA entirely.
Surprise: the kids in FBA-guided plans did no better than kids in plans without FBA.
In short, more assessment did not equal more success.
How this fits with other research
Dudley et al. (2008) seems to disagree. Their four students with emotional disorders did better when homework plans came from an FBA.
The gap is size and scope. O et al. ran a tight, four-kid experiment. M et al. scanned a whole journal. Small studies can show FBA wins; across many classrooms the edge fades.
Eighteen years later Nesselrode et al. (2022) and Amador et al. (2024) show schools now favor brief and trial-based FAs. These quicker tools may fix the time barrier that kept early teachers from using FBA at all.
Call et al. (2024) add a fresh twist: preschoolers with autism did fine in FCT no matter which FBA type was used. Together the newer papers say the method matters less than what you do after the assessment.
Why it matters
Stop assuming an FBA label guarantees a better plan. Check the teaching strategy that follows. If time is short, try a brief or trial-based format shown in newer studies. Always measure the child’s progress; that number, not the form you filled out, tells you if the plan works.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Amendments of 1997 mandate the use of functional behavioral assessment (FBA) and positive behavioral supports and interventions for students with disabilities. Although much progress has been made in our understanding of functional analysis over the past 15 years, the extent to which these findings can be generalized across clients, methods, settings, and response classes is unknown. This article reviewed 150 school-based intervention studies conducted with children published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis from 1991 to 1999. Fifty-two percent of these intervention studies did not report using FBA information linked to the intervention. Interventions based on descriptive, experimental, or combined FBA procedures were no more effective than interventions in which no FBA information was provided. With respect to positive behavioral support, over half of the studies targeted appropriate behaviors with two-thirds of them using a combination of antecedent- and consequence-based interventions. Recommendations are made for conducting fundamental research on reliability and validity issues in FBA and determining when, how, and under what conditions FBA procedures are most appropriate.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2004 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2003.04.003