Autism News

Welcome visitors!  This page is dedicated to raising the level of awareness of school practitioners working with students with autism regarding modern strategies that may have come too late for many in the field to have have experienced in their initial education.  Each item on this page relates to an activity that Project ACCESS is working on or otherwise is worthy of dissemination. 

1. Practical Functional Assessment

Behavior Analysts that work with students with autism and who have traditional training may not yet be up to speed with Practical Functional Assessment.  Created by Gregory Hanley, Ph.D., BCBA-D, Practical Functional Assessment was developted to be a "safe and efficient functional assessment procedures that inform highly effective and humane treatments for problem behavior of persons with autism or intellectual disabilities."

From the website: 

"This website is dedicated to disseminating a practical means of determining the occasioning contexts and outcomes responsible for problem behaviors like self-injurious behavior and aggression often associated with autism or intellectual disabilities. The process is generally referred to as a functional assessment. The specific functional assessment process that will be the focus of this website relies on open-ended interviewing and a subsequent functional analysis referred to as an interview-informed, synthesized contingency analysis or IISCA.

Peer-reviewed research has shown IISCAs to be a quick, safe, and reliable means to understand enough about why problem behavior is occurring to design individualized treatments capable of eliminating problem behavior while promoting essential skills such as functional communication, delay and denial toleration, and contextually appropriate behaviors (e.g., accuracy with academics, vocational skills, independent leisure activity)."