Are Functional Analyses In Schools Effective?

By Todd A. Ward, PhD, BCBA-D

Founding Editor, bSci21.org

Public schools are one of the most common places of employment for behavior analysts.  However, conducting behavioral assessments in such environments can sometimes be challenging, let alone a functional analysis in which stimuli are systematically altered across conditions to empirically determine the function of behavior.

Or so we thought.

In a study published in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Michael Mueller and colleagues reviewed 90 functional analysis outcomes across 69 students in public schools.  All of the students had…