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M7: Comprehension Check

Javier Alejandro Garcia

Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College,

Arizona State University

SPE 527: Behavior Analytic

Assessment

CI Carly Vivio

March 2nd, 2021

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Module 7: Comprehension Check

Prompt 1: One of my very first clients was a non-verbal teenager who engaged in self-injurious

behavior, he would bite his hand. He seemed to bite in many different situations, whether when

we were doing his drills, out walking around, when he was denied a tangible, many different

situations. I was told to block him when I could, we tried putting gloves on him, giving him

things to hold in his hands. My BCBA tried addressing functions, such as getting him better able

to communicate using his AAC device, but we were just taking guesses in the dark. After

learning so much about Functional Behavior Assessments and Functional Analysis I wish we

had done some of those to really understand the function. We could have put him in all the

different conditions and taken data. I think taking an in depth look as to the function of the

behavior could have gotten us better results. But I don’t think my employer at the time had the

resources to put that kind of time into his situation.

Prompt 3: I plan on making greater use of Functional Behavior Assessments in my career. If

for some reason I don’t have the time for full FBA’s because of company demands or any

number of reasons, then I will make full use of brief functional analysis with my clients. I will

train up my RBT’s on what we’re going to do and how they can track data or set up conditions

for me. The challenging behaviors presented to us by our clients are very visible challenges for

the families, so the idea of a practitioner doing something to trigger those behaviors will be

difficult for them to understand. But if we can gain insight into the behavior with just a few

sessions of effort I think it is worth it. Especially examples like the latency functional analysis,

where we only need to see the behavior once and measure the time it took to occur after the

antecedent to measure its strength.