Functional communication training has been reported to be a promising treatment for severe behavior problems. In this study, functional communication training alone and combined with extinction and/or punishment was evaluated for 4 clients with severe retardation, behavior problems, and communication deficits. The participants were inpatients on a hospital unit for treatment of severe behavior disorders. They received individualized interventions based on functional assessment that included reinforcement of a communication response with the same function as their destructive behavior. Results showed that for some patients, functional communication training was not sufficient to produce clinically significant reductions in destructive behavior, and the combination of training plus punishment produced the largest and most consistent reductions.

Obscene verbalizations of a person with traumatic brain injury were treated using stimulus fading as the singular form of intervention. Results of a functional assessment revealed that obscenity was maintained by negative reinforcement. Stimulus fading (initial elimination of instructional demands followed by their gradual reintroduction) produced immediate and substantial reductions in obscenity that were maintained as the frequency of demands increased to baseline levels. Potential applications of the use of antecedent treatment strategies are discussed.

Office discipline referrals are a common practice in public schools to address students' problem behaviors. The authors report two descriptive studies in a public elementary-middle school to illustrate frequency of office referrals as an evaluative data source. Study I was a behavioral assessment of office referrals to determine the types of discipline problems confronting school personnel and the distribution of referrals among teachers, students, and grade level. In Study II, a fifth-grade class that had the most office referrals in the school received whole-class and individual-student interventions that produced a decrease in the number of referrals. These findings support use of office referrals as a readily available index by which to identify school discipline problems, design interventions, and evaluate outcome.

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