State of the Science in the Assessment and Management of Severe Behavior Problems in School Settings: Behavior Analytic Consultation to Schools.

Abstract In school settings, behavior analysts are often called in to consult on severe behavioral issues that surpass the knowledge, experience, and training of local school personnel. Severe behavior such as aggression to staff, SIB, and property destruction are common severe behavior referrals. The benefits of functional assessments, functional analyses, preference assessments, treatment analyses, and generalization analyses have been well documented in school and clinic-based research. However, to date, a unified framework to guide behavior analysts through these best practices in school settings has not been proposed. Further, although theoretical models for school consultation have been proposed (viz., Direct Behavioral Consultation), no empirical case examples of existing models have been published. The current paper describes the Behavior Analytic Consultation to Schools (BACS) model, its application to severe behavior problems, and provides 2 case examples of the BACS model to solve difficult severe behavior referrals in school settings. Keywords: Behavior Analytic Consultation to Schools (BACS), severe behavior, non-severe behavior, functional analysis ********** Children with developmental disabilities, severe cognitive impairments, mental retardation, and pervasive developmental disorders (e.g., autistic disorder) often demonstrate severe destructive behavior in school settings (Broussard & Northup, 1995; Foxx, 1982; Sasso & Reimers, 1988; Sasso, et al., 1992). Such behavior can have detrimental effects on those children, their peers, and on their classrooms as a whole (Ellis & Magee, 1999). Severe behavior such as aggression to staff, self-injury, and property destruction often lead to missed instructional time, physical injury to staff and peers, and to the use of invasive emergency procedures such as physical restraint (Burke, Hagan-Burke, & Sugai, 2003). The importance of reducing or eliminating destructive behavior in public school settings is obvious. In this paper, we make a distinction early on between "severe" and "non-severe" behavioral referrals. Severe behavior, as discussed here, refers to behavior that is physically dangerous to a person or to those to whom a person's behavior is directed. Examples include self-injurious behavior (SIB; head banging, head hitting, self biting, etc.), physical aggression to staff and peers (e.g., kicking punching, biting, etc.), and property destruction (e.g., breaking furniture, throwing chairs, etc.). Non-severe behavior common to classroom-based behavioral referrals refer to such behavior as noncompliance, disruption, getting out of one's seat, teasing, bullying, name calling, not completing work assignments, and inattention to tasks, etc. The distinction between the two types of behavioral referrals described above is made in order to contrast severe behavioral issues against other disruptive but non-severe behavioral issues such that issues related to staff working with children who demonstrate severe behavior problems can be properly put into context. The importance of making such a distinction will be discussed later in this paper. Much is known about the effective assessment and treatment of severe behavior in school settings. The applied behavior analysis literature is filled with many examples of functional assessment, treatment selection, and treatment evaluation of behavioral interventions in school settings (Cipani, 1999; Moore, Mueller, Dubard, Roberts, & Sterling-Turner, 2002; Mueller & Kafka, 2005; Mueller, Moore, & Sterling-Turner, 2005; Mueller, Wilczynski, Moore, Fusilier, & Trahant, 2001; Watson & Steege, 2003). Very little emphasis in the behavioral community, however, has been placed on effective models of providing such services on a consultative basis. It has been the school psychology literature that has addressed consultative issues including theoretical models to guide experts or to train consultees (e. …