The effects of coaching on teachers' use of function-based interventions for students with severe disabilities

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of coaching on special education teachers' implementation of function-based interventions with students with severe disabilities through the use of a delayed multiple baseline across participants design. This study also sought to examine if teachers could generalize the ability to implement function-based interventions to different situations with their students. Additionally, this study examined the effect of the function-based intervention on the students' problem and replacement behaviors. After an initial training on completion of FBAs and implementation of function-based interventions, coaching was provided by the researcher to each teacher. Results indicated that there was a functional relationship between implementation of the coaching procedure and an increase in teacher fidelity scores. Teachers demonstrated the ability to generalize the strategies to another situation with the target student. While some improvement in student behavior was noted upon teachers implementation of the function-based intervention without coaching (e.g., teacher baseline), this improvement was not consistent for all students and across the replacement behaviors. A functional relationship was found between accurate implementation of the function-based interventions (e.g., the coaching phase) and an increase in the students' primary replacement behaviors.