Functional assessment of the effects of escape and attention on students' compliance during instruction.

Abstract

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.

An Examination of Functional Behavior Assessment in Public School Settings: Collaborative Teams, Experts, and Methodology

“…That is, while experts advocate for using a variety of procedures to collect information regarding behavior and the environmental conditions surrounding it, their lack of direct involvement may reduce the meaningfulness of their contributions to the outcome of the process. On the other hand, although individualized team members' experiences make them privy to pertinent information, they have not demonstrated an ability to develop reliable or valid hypotheses of function and, as some have suggested, may not be able to do so in the absence of a trained expert to lead the process (Conroy, Clark, Gable, & Fox, 1999;Noell, VanDerheyden, Gatti, & Whitmarsh, 2001;Stichter, Shellady, & Sealander, 2000). Thus, the barrier to expert-driven FBA seems to be the absence of information afforded by contact with the student, and the barrier to practitioner-driven FBA seems to be lack of fluency with the formalized processes and procedures necessary to perform an analysis of behavior.…”

Functional Behavior Assessment Training in Public Schools

“…Staff training in collaborative FBA cannot be delivered successfully via a hit-and-run inservice model (Sailor et al, 2000). Instead, training must involve an introduction to the concept, with sufficient examples, followed by facilitation and continued support of the transition process (Noell, VanDerHeyden, Gatti, & Whitmarsh, 2001;Scott & Nelson, 1999a). The generic steps for performing a collaborative team-based FBA are presented in Table 1.…”

“…He then used lists of identified at-risk students to show the faculty that this amount of time is not sufficient to meet the comprehensive behavior support needs at King Elementary. In addition to effective example selection, training must facilitate generalization by providing multiple opportunities for follow-up training and troubleshooting (Conroy et al, 1999;Noell et al, 2001;Taylor-Green et al, 1997). Bridges (1991) suggested that in the typical system, a small group of individuals have the requisite skills to make the proposed changes and will often simply move ahead on their own.…”

Teachers’ Commands and Their Role in Preschool Classrooms

“…Teachers' instructions to students within the classroom, aid in the acquisition of both the students' academic and nonacademic skills. Teachers' commands promote verbal and social skills, and facilitate appropriate classroom behavior (Atwater & Morris, 1988;Ford, Olmi, Edwards & Tingstrom, 2001;Matheson & Shriver, 2005;Noell, VanDerHeyden, Gatti & Whitmarsh, 2001). In this respect, compliance to teacher commands is an integral aspect of classroom behavior management.…”

“…Overall, throughout the vast array of command/compliance literature, only a few studies have studied commands in naturalistic classroom settings (Atwater & Morris, 1988;Matheson & Shriver, 2005;Ndoro, Hanley, Tiger, & Heal, 2006;Noell et al, 2001;Strain, Lambert, Kerr, Stagg, & Lenkner, 1983). Researchers have generally studied one command type at a time leading to the overlap in identification and description of commands and to some confusion regarding the role that command form, specificity, and rate play in a child's compliance to commands (Houlihan et al, 1992;Houlihan, Vincent, Ellison, & Jones, 1994).…”