Teams of school psychologists and special educators are working collaboratively to learn functional assessment methodologies and to develop skills in direct assessment that lead to socially valid positive behavioral supports for students with disabilities. School psychologists are supporting the development of skills in functional assessment through direct supervision and peer review models. We invite our colleagues to continue to develop direct methods for assessing student behavior. We encourage school psychologists to design innovative, effective and efficient behavioral support plans, and to systematically evaluate their effectiveness. Summary Given the empirical, conceptual, regulatory and legal support for functional assessment, we need to implement existing functional assessment models and continue to develop technically sound, effective and efficient methods for assessing the vast array of behaviors exhibited by students in our schools.
Students have a right to rigorous and technically sound assessments.
Students have a right to effective and empirically-based interventions. For purposes of intervention development, functional assessment represents the most reliable and valid methodology available. Functional assessment represents a best practices approach to the assessment of problem behavior. It made sense long before IDEA '97 and it will well into the future. An approach of functional assessment and analysis of disruptive behavior in regular education classroom.