146 / May 2007 Behavioral Disorders, 32 (3), 146–157 The Future of Functional Behavioral Assessment in School Settings Terrance M. Scott University of Louisville Debra M. Kamps University of Kansas ABSTRACT: Although FBA has been a familiar term to those in special education for over 30 years, its formal inclusion into IDEA is relatively recent. Currently, agreement as to the nature, context, and application of the FBA process is, at best, confusing and, at worst, inadequate to direct ellective practice in schools. An analysis of the issues that define FBA as an evidence-based practice in special education lead to the conclusion that function, efficiency, and context are keys to effective implementation of FBA as a school-based practice. Also included is an introduction to the articles in this special issue that serve to clarify future direction in addressing these issues This special issue of Behavioral Disorders focuses on the effective implementation of functional behavior assessment (FBA) in natural school settings. Although FBA has been a familiar term to those in special education since at least the mid-1970s, its formal inclusion into special education is relatively recent (i.e., 1997). Still, even though legislated, there is no statutory or generally agreed upon standard definition of the processes or procedures that constitute an FBA (Sasso, Conroy, Peck-Stichter, & Fox, 2001; Scott, Meers, & Nelson, 2000). We like Miltenberger’s (1997) definition, that FBA is a systematic method of “generating information on the events preceding and following behavior in an attempt to determine which antecedents and consequences are reliably associated with the occurrence of the behavior” (p. 563). But how should we define “systematic”? What constitutes acceptable “generation of information”? What information is relevant? What are the criteria for the reliability of an association? These questions seem to mirror the very issues that continue to challenge the field in its quest for reliably implementing and demonstrating the FBA process in typical school and classroom settings. Defining FBA A logical starting point for discussing FBA would be to define it historically, describing the underlying principles and the existing research base. In an early Behavioral Disorders Forum article, Sasso and colleagues (2001) outlined an agenda for the field to address the functional assessment requirement in the reauthorization of the Individuals With Disabilities Act (IDEA 1997), and to do so in the spirit of significantly enhancing interventions for students with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD): Behavioral function is most fully defined as a discriminated operant comprised of four parts: (1) the establishing operation that momentarily makes a reinforcer effective; (2) discriminative stimuli that signal that reinforcement is available; (3) the responses that have resulted in a certain class of reinforcement in the past; and (4) the class of events that reinforce the problem behavior. (Michael, 1982, 1993; Sasso et al., 2001, p. 284) Sasso et al. (2001) identified the experimental analog assessment model (Iwata, Dorsey, Slifer, Bauman, & Richman, 1982; Iwata, Pace, Cowdery, & Miltenberger, 1994) as the only technology available that meets these criteria. The goal of functional assessment is thus to identify contextual variables that are directly related to challenging behavior and to use the assessment data to select empirically based interventions. In a more recent review, Hanley and colleagues suggest that a hallmark of effective interventions is that they are predicated on an understanding of the conditions motivating and maintaining problem behavior based on empirical findings produced by functional assessment and analysis (Hanley, Iwata, &