 I think we'll start this out with an example of a Hilbert chain, as you're going to have eight pads. I wonder if I'm a bit loud. You're grabbed by the function of a muller. We might be wrong. We're funny, but not always a muller. That's an idea. We might be doing stuff in the web soon. Off we go to the ocean. Alright, I digress. Behavioral assessments. Why is Ryan being so weird? We have to define what weird is. How are we going to define what weird is? We're going to do some assessments. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. I might be behind- I don't know. Anyway, we got some issues going on. Let's figure out what behavioral assessment is. Number one, the idea behind behavioral assessment is to find out what the target behavior is. What's the problem behavior? What do we need to change? And then how do we think we're going to change it? Right? That's just a small little thing. That's a small little call for behavioral assessment. It's easier than it sounds because there's lots of different ways we can do assessment. We'll get into those here in just a moment. But I want you to realize that the little implied definition that I gave is really deeper than what it sounds. Because if we're going to identify a behavior, well that's a whole issue right there. Number two, we have to figure out how we're going to assess that behavior. Assess that behavior. And then we have to assume that that assessment is believable, accurate, valid, reliable, blah blah blah, all that stuff, right? So then we also have to figure out how we're going to change it. And for that, we better have a really darn good assessment to get at the function. So one of the important parts of our behavioral assessment that you need to remember. I don't know if I'm on 0.3 or 17, but 0.53 says you need to make sure that you will work on the functions of the response. Because when you start to identify why the response is engaging in the bay, when you start to identify the why part, what you do through observation, not through interview, all right? So when we figure out the functions of the response, then we'll be much much more likely to be able to change that response for the better, either increasing or decreasing or just getting rid of it all together. So remember behavioral assessment, that long term goal is about coming up with a way to change the response. So in order to do that, we're going to absolutely need to know the function of it. So keep that in mind when we start talking about the different pieces. All right. A little bit else on behavioral assessment first is that when we do this, we don't want to ask other people why somebody engages in a response. So let me back up because I got ahead of myself. So one of the methods that we can use for behavioral assessment is an indirect procedure. That indirect procedure would be interviewing people. So the first type of people you can interview is the person with the problem. Maybe it's yourself, maybe you're trying to evaluate your own behavior and engage in some self-management skills, right? Trying to change something about you. So you can interview yourself, ask yourself questions about the behavior. When do I engage in this behavior? What things are present when I engage? What happens when I do engage? Is there a certain times and days? Is there locations? What's the environment? What's happening? What's the context? All this fun stuff. But notice what I didn't ask myself? Why am I engaging in the behavior? And I wouldn't ask somebody, a client even, I wouldn't say, Hey Billy Bob, why are you engaging in the behavior? Billy Bob doesn't know unless Billy Bob has done a behavioral assessment of himself. And I highly doubt he's done that because otherwise we as behavior analysts wouldn't be here trying to help solve the problem. So interview is an effective tool, but you need to make sure that you're focused on the what's, not the why's, right? Same thing goes if you're going to interview someone else about that particular person that has the problem behavior. That someone else would be people that are often around the individual. So maybe family, parents, teachers, other siblings, friends, so on and so forth. So you've got this indirect methods of assessment through interview with the client and others. There's other things that we can do too. There's checklists, a whole bunch of them out there. Did the behavior happen? Did it not happen? How often? A whole bunch of these things that have all been standardized that you can get. There are standardized tests as well, which are the big battery things that we don't really use too often in our field, but there's some of them that are useful for you. The most important kind that you're going to be engaging in always is direct assessment, direct observation of behavior. So we're going to do ABC recordings and AC behavior consequence. We're going to do, let's see, I don't know, oh my gosh, event recording, what's happening, when is it going on, things like that, right? So those are direct assessments. We're going to count the behaviors. We're going to count the context. We're going to measure as much as we possibly can. But again, we're not going to worry about that Y until we're at the end. How do you get to the Y? It's really simple. Really awesome behavioral observations, direct assessments, record what happens after the behavior occurs, because that's going to start to get you at the functions of response. So there's a lot to this. We can go in more depth about the individual pieces, but I think you got it for now. We're going to give you some more later on some other stuff about behavioral assessment. Thanks a ton.