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This study examined three strategies for assessing compliance in students whose speech and language development were delayed. The effects of attention versus escape from instruction following compliance were examined through a descriptive assessment in the classroom, an out-of-class experimental analysis conducted by a consultant, and an inclass experimental analysis implemented by the teacher. The in-class analysis supported an attention-based intervention for all participants. The descriptive assessment data for compliance yielded ambiguous results or results that were not supported by subsequent experimental analyses. Analogue analyses supported the same hypotheses as the in-class analysis when they yielded clear results, but this assessment procedure did not consistently yield clear results. The implications of these findings for functional assessments in education are discussed.Teacher-delivered demands are ubiquitous regularities of education. Teachers use directions and questions to provide students opportunities to learn and to guide students' academic and nonacademic behavior. However, the efficacy of directions and questions as teaching tools is limited by the degree to which students comply with teachers' requests. When students do not comply with teacher demands, they are less likely to benefit from instruction and are at increased risk for disciplinary sanctions (Skiba, Peterson, & Williams, 1997). Students who are chronically noncompliant are frequently exposed to increasingly restrictive educational placements and disciplinary sanctions (Kern, Childs, Dunlap, Clarke, & Falk, 1994). Additionally, interventions for noncompliance are commonly based This study was supported in part by research grant 98-IB-UI-S5 from the Louisiana Department of Education. The authors thank Kristin Gansle, Nancy Neef, and an anonymous reviewer for their constructive comments.

This study compared two strategies for increasing accurate responding on a low-preference academic task by interspersing presentations of a preferred academic task. Five children attending a preschool program for children with delayed language development participated in this study. Preferred and nonpreferred tasks were identified through a multiple-stimulus, free-operant preference assessment. Contingent access to a preferred academic task was associated with improved response accuracy when compared to noncontingent access to that activity for 3 students. For 1 student, noncontingent access to the preferred activity led to improved response accuracy, and 1 student's analysis suggested the importance of procedural variety. The implications of these findings for use of preference assessments to devise instructional sequences that improve student responding are discussed.