Functional Analysis in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Functional analysis (FA) is an assessment procedure involving the systematic manipulation of an individual’s environment to determine why a target behavior is occurring. An analog FA provides practitioners the opportunity to manipulate variables in a controlled environment and formulate a hypothesis for the function of a behavior. In previous studies, researchers have attempted to train practitioners who have no experience with FA to implement the conditions with procedural integrity. In these studies, researchers used a traditional professional development model (e.g., didactic training, role-play). To date, simulation and virtual environments have not been used to enhance FA training procedures in the preparation of teachers and behavior analysts. In the current investigation, we sought to train educators to implement two test conditions of an analog FA (i.e., attention, escape). The intervention package included a didactic training and individual and group-rehearsed FA trainings in a virtual environment (i.e., TeachLivE™). Teachers demonstrated an increase in their fidelity of implementation within three sessions and generalized performance to a classroom setting. The implications for rural teachers are considerable as the results suggest we can train teachers on complex assessment techniques at a distance.