BA430 Unit 10 Functional Assessment Review Paper Example

Which Method Decided Each Case? A BA430 Unit 10 Functional Assessment Review Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

BA430: Behavior Assessment

Unit 10 Functional Assessment Review Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the cooperative, the students and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

Three Cases, One Year

This year I followed three students through functional assessment as a behavior specialist trainee with a rural special education cooperative in western Montana. Kou, nine, screamed and hit staff during transitions. Brynn, fourteen, tore worksheets and left her classroom. Wyatt, six, hit his head and mouthed objects. Each case used a different combination of methods, and in each a different method proved decisive. This review looks back at what each method contributed and what that suggests for practice.

What Practitioners Actually Do

Oliver et al. (2015) surveyed practicing behavior analysts about the functional assessment methods they used. Respondents reported using indirect and descriptive methods far more often than experimental functional analyses. Many reported rarely or never conducting functional analyses, and the barriers they named included lack of time, lack of space or trained staff, and lack of acceptance by administrators or others. The authors noted the gap between this practice and the research literature, in which functional analysis is considered the most rigorous method for identifying function.

My cooperative fits the survey. Before this year, most of its assessments relied on rating scales and teacher notes. Experimental analyses were rare, partly because few staff were trained to run them and partly because schools worried about their safety.

Kou: The Analysis Was Decisive

Kou's indirect assessment produced three raters naming three functions. Descriptive data, collected with a structured form after narrative notes proved misleading, narrowed the hypothesis to two variables that always arrived together, regaining the truck and postponing the walk to the noisy gym. Only a functional analysis, followed by trial-based checks in real transitions, separated them. Access to the truck was primary.

Thompson and Iwata (2007) found that descriptive and functional analyses often disagree, and that attention frequently appears in descriptive data because adults tend to talk to a child after an outburst whatever its function. Kou's narrative notes showed exactly that pattern: eighteen of twenty-two entries named attention, which the analysis did not support.

Without the analysis, Kou's plan would have rested on attention, the one function every method but the analysis suggested.

Brynn: The Record Review Was Decisive

Brynn's case turned on information collected before any observation. The record review found a prior assessment that had concluded attention, a failed token economy and, buried deep in the file, a sleep study diagnosing apnea. Descriptive data then showed tearing clustered on mornings after poor nights. A brief functional analysis confirmed escape, but by then the record review had already reframed the case: the plan had to address sleep and task difficulty as well as function.

Wyatt: The Referral Was Decisive

Wyatt's head hitting had risen sharply over the summer, and his records noted ear infections. The review led to a pediatric referral before any functional assessment, and treatment of his ear infections reduced the hitting by more than half. My supervisor's assessment of the remaining hitting and mouthing continues, with preference assessments I ran identifying reinforcers for teaching. In his case, a behavioral assessment that ignored medical causes could have spent weeks analyzing hitting driven by pain.

How the Methods Fit Together

The three cases suggest a sequence rather than a ranking. Record review comes first and can identify medical causes or prior failures that change everything else. Indirect methods are quick and include families, but Iwata et al. (2013) showed that informant agreement is modest and that screening tools match functional analyses only part of the time, so their results are hypotheses. Descriptive methods show what happens in natural settings and identify antecedents and setting events, but they cannot separate confounded variables. Experimental analysis can, and it should be used when the other methods leave function uncertain and the risks can be managed.

Hanley (2012) argued that functional analyses are more feasible than many practitioners believe, especially when open-ended interviews guide which conditions to test and when analyses are brief. Kou's analysis took two short mornings and a week of embedded trials, with no injuries. The barriers named in the survey were real in my cooperative, but they were smaller than expected.

Three Changes for Next Year

In hindsight, three of my choices deserve changing. I would have called Brynn's physician in the first week rather than waiting for the October team meeting, since the sleep study changed her case and the doctor's view of how apnea affected her mornings arrived only in November. I would have skipped the closed-ended rating scale with Kou's grandmother entirely and gone straight to an interpreted interview, which gave far richer information. And I would have started structured descriptive recording on day one instead of inheriting three weeks of narrative notes that pointed the team toward attention. None of these changes requires more staff or money. Each requires deciding at the start which information matters most and collecting it in a form that can be checked, which is a habit I plan to keep in every case.

A Proposal for the Cooperative

Based on this year, I proposed four practices to my supervisor for the cooperative. First, every referral begins with a full record review, including medical records with consent, and a check for biological setting events. Second, closed-ended rating scales are replaced with open-ended interviews as Hanley recommends, conducted with trained interpreters when families speak another language. Third, descriptive data use structured forms with agreement checks, not narrative notes. Fourth, when function remains uncertain, a supervised brief or trial-based functional analysis is conducted, with a written safety plan and family consent.

She agreed to pilot the first three practices across the cooperative next year and to train two more staff to assist with analyses.

Culture and Families Throughout

Each case also depended on families. Kou's grandmother explained what the school's transitions disrupted at home, Brynn's mother added the goal that proved most important, and Wyatt's parents found a reinforcer at home that no one at school had tried. Functional assessment is often described as a sequence of technical methods, but the families supplied information no method could have produced.

Conclusion

A record review, a functional analysis and a medical referral each decided one of three cases. Oliver and colleagues' survey showed that practitioners rely mainly on indirect and descriptive methods, and Thompson and Iwata's findings showed why those methods can mislead, as they did with Kou. Hanley's argument for feasible analyses, together with this year's experience, supports a sequence that starts with records, includes families and uses experimental analysis when other methods leave function uncertain.

References

Hanley, G. P. (2012). Functional assessment of problem behavior: Dispelling myths, overcoming implementation obstacles, and developing new lore. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 5(1), 54-72. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03391818

Iwata, B. A., DeLeon, I. G., & Roscoe, E. M. (2013). Reliability and validity of the Functional Analysis Screening Tool. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 46(1), 271-284. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.31

Oliver, A. C., Pratt, L. A., & Normand, M. P. (2015). A survey of functional behavior assessment methods used by behavior analysts in practice. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 48(4), 817-829. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.256

Thompson, R. H., & Iwata, B. A. (2007). A comparison of outcomes from descriptive and functional analyses of problem behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40(2), 333-338. https://doi.org/10.1901/jaba.2007.56-06