Positive behavior support (PBS) and functional behavioral assessment (FBA) are two significant concepts of the 1997 amendments to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. These two concepts are not new, but they are important for improving the quality of efforts to educate children and youth with disabilities. The purposes of this article are to describe (a) the context in which PBS and FBA are needed and (b) definitions and features of PBS and FBA. An important message is that positive behavioral interventions and supports involve the whole school, and successful implementation emphasizes the identification, adoption, and sustained use of effective policies, systems, data-based decision making, and practices. Systems-level challenges are also discussed.

Students with emotional disturbance (ED) depend upon special education teachers (SETs) to use evidence-based practices (EBPs) to promote their well-being. SETs, in turn, depend upon school leaders to provide working conditions that support learning and implementation of academic and social EBPs. We conducted an integrative narrative review of research examining working conditions SETs experience serving students with ED in self-contained schools and classes, to better understand whether SETs in these settings experience conditions necessary to effectively implement academic and social EBPs. Our findings suggest that conditions necessary for learning and implementing EBPs are seldom present in these settings. In addition, the extant research on SETs’ working conditions in these settings is largely disconnected from research investigating teachers’ use of EBPs.

Functional behavior assessment (FBA) is a process of assessing the purpose or "function" of a student's behavior in relation to its context (i.e., surrounding environment), so that appropriate interventions can be designed to meet the unique needs of individual students (Iwata et al., 2000; Jolivette, Scott, & Nelson, 2000). This assessment process facilitates the development of individualized behavior support plans for students with challenging behaviors (O'Neill et al., 1997; Scott & Nelson, 1999b; Sugai, Lewis-Palmer, & Hagan, 1998). Traditionally, FBA has been presented and practiced as a prescribed formalized procedure involving multiple direct observations of student behavior, quantitative analysis of behavioral patterns, and valid hypothesis testing prior to intervention (e.g., Liaupsin, Scott, & Nelson, 2000; O'Neill et al., 1997). Critical reviews examining empirical support for the use of FBA with students with or at risk for emotional or behavioral disorders (E/BD) have been the subject of other welldocumented discussions appearing in this journal (e.g.

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Although functional behavior assessment (FBA) is widely advocated as best practice in developing effective behavior intervention plans for students with challenging behaviors, there is no compelling evidence supporting the ability of school-based personnel to use the outcomes of FBA to develop effective interventions. In this study, selected staff members from four elementary schools were trained in how to use the outcomes of an FBA to develop function-based intervention plans. They then formed school-based intervention teams and served as facilitators for a total of 31 cases. The same cases also were distributed to three national FBA experts who selected interventions based on the identified function for each case. The number and type of selected intervention strategies were recorded and analyzed across cases. Comparisons between team and expert intervention strategy selection revealed that school-based personnel in this study were more likely to select punitive and exclusionary strategies, regardless of function. Thus, in real-world school settings, the link between FBA and intervention is far more complex than has been recognized or discussed in the literature. Discussion focuses on possible explanations for the finding that school-based teams tend to gravitate toward more negative and exclusionary strategies, even when mediated by a trained FBA facilitator.