Uppeldi og menntun - 01.07.2011, Side 142

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 20 (2) 2011142
dregið úr hegðUnarerfiðleikUm
Understanding is key
Decreasing students´ longlasting behavior problems with functional
behavioral assessment and behavior support plans
abstraCt
Functional Behavioral Assessment (FBA) and Behavior Support Plans (BSP) are
evidence-based practices recommended for addressing severe behavior problems
of students by professional associations and part of the Individuals with Disabilities
Education Act from 1997 and 2004 in the United States of America. Decades of research
have shown FBA and BSPs to be effective procedures for reducing behavior problems
and increasing on-task behavior of students with chronic behavior problems. Staff
training in these procedures has been found to be effective in increasing school
personnel´s knowledge of FBA, but only a few studies have included measures
of students´ behavior. Research is also lacking on the effects of college courses for
educators on the behavior of students in preschools, elementary or secondary schools
that the educators work with.
In Iceland, training in FBA and BSPs had until recently only been offered through
in-service training for school personnel, with undocumented results. Since 2009, such
training has been part of an elective course on emotional and behavioral disorders
in the School of Education at the University of Iceland. The goal of this study was
to evaluate the effects of FBAs and BSPs conducted by graduate students on the
behavior problems of preschool, elementary and secondary students they worked
with. Participants were 49 students (45 boys and five girls), aged 3–20 years, with a
reported history of 1–18 years of behavior problems. The course consisted of 11 hours
of lectures on emotional and behavioral disorders and 12 hours of lectures on applied
behavior analysis. Graduate students also had access to a variety of assessment and
intervention materials on the website of the course. Graduate students formed two
to four member teams, each working with one student with behavior problems in
mainstream preschool, elementary or secondary school. Teams conducted FBAs and
BSPs following detailed guidelines in six steps, wrote a brief report on each step and
received written feedback from the author before moving on to the next stage.
To evaluate the effects of BSPs on the target behaviors of students, teams conducted
repeated measures with direct observation using a total of 70 AB single-subject
designs. The author combined the collected data and calculated descriptive statistics
for baseline and intervention phases to compare students’ behavior before and after
BSPs. Single group pretest-posttest designs were used to evaluate the effects of
function-based BSPs on the behavior problems of students. Nonparametric Wilcoxon
tests for related samples (matched-pair signed-rank) were conducted to compare
medians of means for each group before and after intervention. Comparing medians
of means, disruptive behavior decreased by 75%, aggressive behaviors decreased by