Schools Link Assessment to Behavior Intervention

by Elizabeth Schaughency, Ph.D., and Steve Goodman, Ph.D.

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Data-Based Decision Making Makes Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support (PBS) More Effective

Every educator knows the value of appropriate social behavior within the instructional setting. Disruptive behavior interferes with the learning of both the student having difficulty and those around him or her. If it takes 15 minutes to process an office discipline referral (ODR), a school with 550 ODRs per year spends approximately 23 six-hour days processing referrals yearly. By reducing the number of referrals, staff can better use the time to address academic progress. In other words, teachers can teach, and students can learn.

Schoolwide Positive Behavior Support (PBS) focuses on ways to support appropriate social behavior for all students within a school. Using PBS, school personnel can improve school climate, social-behavioral functioning, and the learning environment for all students, despite tight budgets, competing demands, and limited time. Teachers learn to “work smarter, not harder” (Kameenui & Carnine, 2002). Schoolwide PBS allows teachers and administrators to become more effective and efficient by helping them collect and use data to make decisions about intervention at the individual, classroom, or schoolwide level. The selected interventions help students learn.

Why Bother with Data?

As is evident in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), educators are called to be accountable—for what they do and for the achievement of ALL students. Many in education point to a research-to-practice gap in special education (e.g., see Remedial and Special Education 20; Exceptional Children, 1999, Vol. 65). One factor contributing to this gap is the perception that “research findings won’t generalize to my situation (student, classroom, school, community).”

People, organizations, and situations are unique. That’s why schoolwide PBS takes an individualized approach, using data to inform each stage of the problem-solving process. For example, information helps decision-makers identify problems within a school. Schools become more effective when they can accurately identify those situations or students in need of additional support or intervention. Schools become more efficient when they identify which current practices work and therefore do not need attention or resources (i.e., “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). Moreover, since it’s hard to predict how unique persons, schools, or situations will respond to any intervention, evidenced-based practices serve as a best guess of which interventions are most likely to be effective; systematically evaluating how the interventions are working helps schools adapt them to meet the unique needs of the student and the school more effectively.

Finding and Supporting Key Personnel Leads to Success in Schoolwide PBS

Many stakeholders within the school setting want to make informed decisions regarding PBS. Administrators want to know how their leadership is guiding the social climate. Teachers want to know if classroom interventions are effective. Student assistance teams evaluate intervention plans for individual students. And parents want confirmation their children are attending safe schools.

When setting up information systems, school leaders need to take several steps:

• Identify key decision-makers and the data that will inform decisions.
• Assign staff who will collect information, compile it in some usable form, and then report results to various stakeholders.
• Provide staff with the knowledge and skills to make data-driven decisions. These skills include: accurately and consistently collecting, recording, and interpreting information; using technology to store and retrieve information; and linking assessment results to intervention decisions.

Many Types of Behavior Data Inform PBS Decisions

Many types of information are useful in schoolwide PBS. In fact, schools make better decisions when they draw information from multiple sources, referred to as triangulation (see Glossary). Moreover, different questions require different information. Keeping in mind the goal—to develop interventions that more effectively and efficiently solve problems—there are some common characteristics of information useful for linking assessment to intervention:

• Assessment should reflect the behavior in the natural environment. The aim is to develop interventions that more effectively support behavior within the natural environment (e.g., classroom, other school setting), so schools need to assess behavior within these contexts. Assessing students in their natural environment also helps identify contextual factors that can influence a student’s behavior.
  
  For example, sometimes students have difficulties because they lack the skills to meet behavioral expectations. However, in other situations, their difficulties may be performance difficulties (i.e., the student has the right skills but the context influences his performance of those skills). Once a problem has been identified, a look at the contextual factors (in the student’s natural environment) can help guide staff as they work to solve the problem.
• Assessment should provide ongoing evaluation of progress. Assessment should not be a one-time procedure—something that happens before an intervention is developed. Instead, it should be an on-going process. Before intervention, assessment helps identify and describe problems (and the contextual factors that influence them) in order to develop an appropriate behavior support strategy. During the intervention, assessment helps us determine whether the behavior is changing in the desired direction. Later, assessment tells us whether change is being maintained over time or whether there is a need for additional support.
• Measures should be efficient and serve a range of uses, e.g., screening, eligibility determination, goal setting, intervention planning, program evaluation. Data must provide useful information while not being time-consuming to collect. If possible, data collection should be embedded within ongoing activities in the school. In this way, educators save time and resources that can be better spent on behavior support.
  
  To help educators collect data efficiently, PBS leaders at the University of Oregon developed the Schoolwide Information System (SWIS). Using SWIS, educators can easily record information about student behavior and record it in a form that can be used later to solve problems (see Figure 1). For example, a student who breaks a school rule typically is sent to the principal’s office. Unfortunately, too often these behavioral difficulties are not documented. If they are recorded, the records are not made available to others who work with the child. This means that potentially valuable information is unavailable for future problem solving. By using SWIS, school staff can record, retrieve, and analyze information about such behavior incidents to provide school personnel with behavioral data for decision-making.
• Use a multiple-gating approach to assessment. One way to increase efficiency of data gathering is to use a multiple-gating approach to assessment. In this approach, schools start with less costly and time-consuming strategies, such as office discipline referrals (ODRs), moving to more intensive strategies only when indicated.
  
  For example, planning behavior interventions using functional assessment (FA) is a promising strategy for developing effective behavior support plans (Repp, Felce, & Barton, 1988). However, some methods for conducting FAs require more work than others (See Figure 2). When staff members enter into the SWIS database information about setting and possible motivation, a SWIS data report provides a potential starting point for a FA-based behavior support plan. After looking at the SWIS data, if the student assistance team agrees about possible function, it may be ready to plan effective behavior intervention (Gersten, 2001). However, when team members do not agree, they may need to pursue more formal FA.

Final Comments: Data Are Important, But Data Aren’t It.

Within the PBS framework, data are simply tools educators use to inform their practice. The process of collecting data is not the same as educating children and implementing behavior intervention plans. These important tasks remain to be done; but the careful collection and consideration of data in educational problem solving can improve these tasks.

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When selecting measurement tools for ongoing evaluation of progress, it’s important to keep in mind two principles:

1. Tools must be appropriate for repeated measures. Some measures in psychology and education are designed to be administered only once, or again only after an extended period of time. These tools are less suited to providing information for evaluating progress.
2. Measures must be sensitive to growth and change in behavior. Many measures in psychology and education have been designed to provide consistent results over time, such as published norm-reference achievement tests. These tests provide relatively consistent information about a student’s standing within a group, but they may be less able to reflect an individual student’s growth.

Source: Elizabeth Schaughency, Ph.D. and Steve Goodman, Ph.D.

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Elizabeth Schaughency, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at Grand Valley State University and Co-Principal Investigator, A Universal and Individually-Referenced K-3 Behavior and Reading Intervention Model. Department of Psychology, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, MI 49401, Phone: (616) 331-2438; Fax: (616) 331-2480; schaughe@gvsu.edu.

Steve Goodman, Ph.D., is Co-Principal Investigator, A Universal and Individually-Referenced
K-3 Behavior and Reading Intervention Model and Co-Director for Michigan’s Integrated Behavior and Learning Support Initiative (MiBLSi). Ottawa Area Intermediate School District, 13565 Port Sheldon Road, Holland, MI 49424, Office Phone: (877) 702-8600; Fax: (616) 738-8946; sgoodman@oaisd.org.

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