What Is a Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA)? A Practical Guide to Understanding Why Behavior Happens
When a behavior keeps happening, one of the easiest questions to ask is also one of the hardest to answer: Why? Why does a student refuse work every afternoon? Why does a child scream when an activity ends? Why does someone repeatedly leave a room, interrupt a conversation, push materials away, or seek the same interaction again and again? A Functional Behavior Assessment , commonly called an FBA , is a systematic way of investigating questions like these. The goal is not simply to describe what a person is doing. The goal is to gather enough useful information to develop a reasonable hypothesis about what function the behavior may be serving . That distinction matters. An FBA Is About Function, Not Just Behavior The U.S. Department of Education describes functional behavioral assessment as a process used to understand the function or purpose of a specific interfering behavior and the factors associated with when that behavior occurs — and when it does not occur. Californi...
