Using Direct and Indirect Functional Assessments to Guide the Selection of Individualized Academic Interventions

Abstract

When teachers work with students exhibiting academic failure, they may look to factors outside of instruction such as a student's home life or perceived disability as explanations. Placing the locus of control outside of the instructional context becomes a convenient way to escape culpability for unsatisfactory outcomes. A more functional approach to addressing academic deficits allows educators to determine environmental factors responsible for the lack of progress and then create interventions designed to address these functions of academic failure. Although experimental analyses serve as the gold standard for evaluating functional relations between behavior and environment, educators may not always have the ability to systematically test all behavior-environment relations. Indirect assessments provide one means to develop hypotheses about environment-behavior relations that can then be validated with experimental analyses. In this study, researchers developed an indirect tool (Academic Diagnostic Checklist -Beta; ADC-B) based on the function of academic performance deficits (Daly et al. in School Psychology Review 26:554, 1997) and validated the use of the ADC-B by comparing interventions that were suggested (indicated) and those non-suggested (contraindicated) by the ADC-B. Researchers used the ADC-B with four participants and found that for three of the four participants, the suggested intervention was the most efficacious at improving accuracy with the target skills. One limitation is that we did not evaluate the full technical adequacy of the ADC-B, which should be a focus of future research.