 But let's start with off with talking about functional assessment because that's kind of one of the keys to our entire System here now oddly functional assessment When people write books about behavior mod they have a hard time figuring out where to put this The primary reason is because this is really what you do first But in order to know what to do first you have to know about the different components involved the basic idea though Is that we're going to be looking for the causes of behavior Or with assessment anyway, we're going to be looking at the likely causes of it There's something called functional analysis, which we'll get into in a little bit which definitely Demonstrates the actual causes of behavior. It's an actual experiment. Okay, so functional assessment We're looking for those causes are the likely causes they can be several the several cases there are several situations here But primarily we're looking for the things that lead to behavior in other words the discriminative stimuli if the behaviors under stimulus control Then we would be able to identify that hopefully using functional assessment Or hopefully be able to identify using functional assessment and then we also look for the reinforcers and things like that So in that last chapter, of course, it talks about all those different tools that we're going to use the interviews and things like that So we're going to use everything we have available both direct assessment indirect assessment that we can to perform this Excuse me now that we can to perform this functional assessment All right But that said again, you know, I don't I don't know this is tough because a lot of people when they do FA functional assessment they they like to do a bunch of indirect measures and There's a certain value to that because the idea with indirect measures is that I'm going to interview all those people that Are familiar with the client or the person who's having the problem behavior and hopefully extract some useful information from them about What may be leading to behavior what we may be maintaining it those types of things and obviously you're not going to ask it in those types of with those types of questions, but ultimately That's what you're trying to get at you don't want to walk in there and say oh, what's what's the distributive stimuli for the behavior now We don't actually say that But we say we ask questions like what you know, what's going on in this child? You know, let's say it's a kid in the school So we say what's going on at school when he misbehaves or she misbehaves and whatever misbehaving means, right? And that's kind of getting at the sd's right and say well, what happens when they misbehave what do you do? And you can ask the teacher and you can talk to parents and there's a there's it's valuable But the problem is is that you don't know if those people are telling the truth You don't know how accurately they're doing their observations. So they may just be Giving you a line, right? They may be just trying to answer your question without being honest about it And not because they're trying to ruin your program, but because they just don't know So from my perspective, we're gonna focus most heavily on direct observation And that is going to be what is really useful about functional assessment Is that we're gonna get in there and actually observe the behavior? So let's look at the procedures first off describe the darn thing, all right So describe the behavior in question and provide an operational definition for it If you do not have an operational definition game over walk away, right? Because you will not be successful It's just a guarantee about that. So we're gonna describe that behavior in crazy detail like you guys have done for the various projects in this course and And again, the idea here is not just the Not just the operational definition, which is kind of I said, but also get that functional definition What value is this behavior performing and we're gonna tease apart that functional definition more and that's the idea with functional assessment, right? So again, let's just look at the title of functional assessment as I digress a bit here and go Into that and say that the reason it's called functional is not because it works, but we're saying functional What is the function of the behaviors? That's what we're really trying to do with a functional assessment, right? So we're gonna describe that behavior and we're gonna define ecological events those things in the context in which it's happening We're gonna define antecedent events, right for the behavior occurring and not occurring, right? so what is actually going on and Under what scenarios, right? And that's what we're at so far identify the consequences for inappropriate behavior. What's going on, right? So what what does the person get out of misbehaving? Let's say it is a kid in the class Maybe they're You know, I don't know throwing a pencil or something But they only throw a pencil when they're asked to do something and maybe the teacher hasn't put a and be together And the idea there would be that obviously they're trying to escape something right so depending on the consequence Maybe they get taken out of the room. Maybe they get removed from the task or told to sit in the corner Well, no matter what it is no matter what those kind of all those consequences They all led to the same thing which is that they got out of the task that they were beaten it that they were Being asked to do Another important thing that we want to do is ask what the person can do instead So if you're working with a kid in the class, you'd say, well, would you like the child to do talk to the teacher and say What would you like them to be? You know, this is the problem behavior What would you like them to do? And again the first thing that people are gonna do is they're gonna say well I want them to be a good child. They should be a good child You know, they get all fired up about that and the problem there is that they need to define what that means So they can know when the kids being good as we've talked about in the past Sometimes just coming up with a definition and then starting to observe it. You realize well, guess what? There's really not a problem here and it seemed like a problem for whatever reason, but it oftentimes it isn't a problem What should you avoid? Right, you know, what sort of behaviors do they not want do you not want them to do What sort of procedures would you not want them to do? Do you can you avoid do you have to avoid punishment? Do you have to avoid food reinforcers? Are there contexts that automatically cause the behavior to happen? Are there Are there people that you put me and let's say the kids in a classroom and they sit next to somebody Do they always argue with that person? That's one of those things that we can worry about So maybe they should just avoid that particular person And what's the history? Let's look at the big picture here All right, how long has this been going on? Is it new? Has it been a problem through multiple grades? Has it been a problem for multiple years? Has it been a problem with multiple teachers multiple classrooms multiple, you know, whatever's right? So what what leads to this kids problems, right? Are there medical issues? That's an important thing to ask as well You know if in fact in school psych we talk about something called a manifestation Determination and that's where you make a determination that the problem behavior is a manifestation of a medical issue If so, then you've got special procedures that you need to follow All right, so that can be part of your functional assessment as well that start to see if you can start getting at those medical issues All right now once you've done all of that sort of stuff And again, this is oftentimes not direct at this point. This is indirect stuff So now is when we get in and start the observations and we're going to start doing a baseline and we're going to get crazy accurate with our baseline and We're going to look for behaviors that are competing with each other, right? You want to behavior to You want the kid to be on task in the classroom? Well, that's competing with off-task behavior We often talk about competing contingencies and that's really what we're getting at here Is that a competing contingency is something where you've got two different contingencies that are working against you Or are working against the the kid one is selecting for inappropriate behavior one is selecting for appropriate behavior so for example If you've got a can competing contingency in the classroom escape may escape of a task may be a more powerful contingency Then is completion of the task. They're competing. They're both functioning at the same time They're both running but one of them is more powerful than the other So maybe we have to change that Sometimes you have the punisher and a reinforcer that are competing and like I've always said punisher's are going to lose Generally speaking punisher's are going to lose Over reinforcement any day of the week. All right An example there would be let's say you're punishing the kid for inappropriate behavior But the kid is still behaving inappropriately still getting out of those tasks. The reinforcer is winning They're still escaping those tasks and even though you're punishing that's not really Going to solve the problem not necessarily anyway, then we're going to provide a summary after we've done all those observations We're going to start to provide the summaries of here's what we think is going on and that's going to lead us to developing an intervention So again the summaries cover all of those things the