Ep. 37: Data Collection Deep Dive – Part 5 of the FBA Mini-Series

In this episode, we dive deep into the critical role of data collection within the Functional Behavior Assessment (FBA) process. Join us as we explore how to transition from anecdotal data to targeted interventions that create meaningful change for students. 🔍

Key Topics Discussed:
- Importance of gathering accurate data to inform behavior interventions. 📊
- The process of sifting through anecdotal information and ABC data to identify target behaviors. 🔄
- Strategies for creating operational definitions that clarify what behaviors to track. ✅
- Various data collection methods, including frequency counts, interval recording, and the red-yellow-green system. 🎨
- The significance of baseline data in evaluating the effectiveness of interventions. 📈
- The ethical considerations of data collection and the importance of consistency among staff. ⚖️

Takeaways:
- Effective data collection is essential for creating an FBA that leads to meaningful behavioral changes. 💡
- Clearly defining behaviors and collecting data in real-time helps to ensure accuracy and relevance. 🔑
- Team collaboration and communication are crucial for successful data collection and implementation. 🤝

Resources Mentioned:
- Examples of data collection forms and strategies for effective tracking. 📃
- Links to our favorite data collection helps! 🔗
     - The classic! Everyone should know this one well: https://amzn.to/4gMGrHf
     - Finger counters https://amzn.to/4gTk7eU
     - Gym boss interval timer https://amzn.to/4h4JQ4i
     - Mini clipboards https://amzn.to/3TT6Rxa

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn a commission (although not much! lol) if you click on the link or make a purchase using the link. When you make a purchase, the price you pay will be the same whether you use the affiliate link or go directly to the vendor's website using a non-affiliate link. By using the affiliate links, you are helping support me, and I genuinely appreciate your support.

Call to Action: If you’re in the midst of an FBA or looking to improve your data collection strategies, be sure to connect with us on social media and share your experiences!

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Misfit Behaviorist podcast for more insights and tips on behavior support and interventions. 🚀

Next Episode Teaser: Tune in next week as we discuss creating effective hypotheses and operational definitions in the FBA process. You won't want to miss it! 📅

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• Caitlin | Beltran’s Behavior Basics
• Sami | B.A.S.S.

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Transcript

Audra: [00:00:00] But then I thought, you know what, it's more like a funnel. It's like when we're taking the ABC data, we're at that top of the funnel. We're putting a whole bunch of stuff in there. And we need to now narrow it down to find the kind of those key patterns 

Intro: Welcome to the Misfit Behaviorist podcast miniseries. This round, join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Sami Brown, here to bring you fun and functional advice for creating and implementing behavior plans. Let's get started. 

Audra: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Misfit Behaviorist podcast, where we are going to continue today to talk about some of our favorite stuff in the FBA process, which is data collection.

So today we want to kind of dive in a little bit more of what you do when you have kind of all this anecdotal information, observations are done, you've gathered some basic information from, you know, the ABC stuff, which is more anecdotal, but you're sort of just gathering and looking into it.

So now where do we go from there to really hone in on what the target behavior is going to be, both the target behavior we want to [00:01:00] reduce or increase, and the replacement behavior. So how do we really get specific about that because we don't want to just go in and, you know, teacher says, I don't like this behavior and we go and take it some ABC and that's good enough.

And then we create an FBA, that's useless because it's not really honing into the specifics of how we can manipulate the environment and the situation to make meaningful change. And so I think that's where we, we fall a lot of times and set of our generic FBAs. In fact, I think I heard in one of, I think it was our misfit group that somebody said, you know, I hate doing an FBA or FBAs are hard because I feel like I'm just putting down what I'm already doing.

Well, then we've gone wrong with the FBA because if we're just jotting down ideas of what we're already doing, then it's not serving the purpose we need it to, which is making meaningful change. And so this step and kind of tweaking the data more and really analyzing and honing in where it's going wrong and exactly what's happening is really, really important.

So, in the time that you and I have done FBAs together, how [00:02:00] have you found this step to be important in the process as we go forward?

Sami: I think first off what you had mentioned, you know, what we see in other groups and amongst other BCBAs, being requested to do an FBA is kind of that social validity piece and making sure that we are identifying target behaviors that are socially significant for the learner and not for the teacher or for the parent or for the administrator or for the classroom. It's specific. That's gonna enrich the life and the purpose for that learner. And then a lot of people think that the FBA is going to fix whatever it is. And so sometimes it really does come down to the data piece and analyzing and reworking everything that's been collected, like a culmination of all the information to determine what's warranted.

And so what I really enjoy about this process is we're kind of now at this place where we've got a whole lot of information. And we're sifting through that to make a bit [00:03:00] more of a targeted approach. 

Audra: I think what you brought up right there, as far as the sifting, really made me think about either, you know, sifting, if you're baking, you know, you're sifting things through. But then I thought, you know what, it's more like a funnel. It's like when we're taking the ABC data, we're at that top of the funnel. We're putting a whole bunch of stuff in there. And we need to now narrow it down to find the kind of those key patterns and when we're looking at ABC data we can see little pieces here and there. And so now we want to take those little pieces and we want to put them together and we really want to track. And I think the really good part about this piece of it is like when you're taking ABC data, it's hard to kind of chart it and graph it and see it visually. But if you figure out those little pieces, those patterns, and you put them into more specific data collection measure, and then you can see the patterns. You can start to create, you know, whether it's bar graph or line graph or something, you can add an intervention, and you can see if it's making change over time objectively, rather than just saying, I think it's getting better, or I don't think it's getting better, or this isn't helping. 

Sami: In my experience [00:04:00] with some of the ABC collection, it does lead to a bit more of emotional language can be put into that, because people take that anecdotal piece a bit far, and they're kind of giving you blocks of information. And so when you target a more specific and tailored data collection for the problem that you're identifying, you're basically sweeping all of that away and basically saying, no, I only want you to look at this.

And we oftentimes as BCBAs, we'll talk about like inter observer agreement, this IOA, because we want, no matter who is collecting the data, that they are all seeing the exact same thing. 

Audra: And I think that's another piece of it is that any time now we're into this specific, we've now targeted a behavior. We know exactly kind of what we want to track and measure. Now is when you create those, what you're talking about, that kind of that objective way to measure. So whatever data collection measure you decide on in this step, you want to make sure that behavior is really defined. You don't want to just say, take behavior on all [00:05:00] the behavior that's happening, or take behavior on tantrum. Well, how are you defining tantrum? When does it start? When does it end? What does it look like? Because if a student has, one little scream because they didn't get the goldfish that they wanted, is that really a tantrum? Or is it when they didn't get it over in, you know, circle time and they fell on the floor? And they rolled around and they screamed and yelled and it took 15 minutes or, how are you defining that? How are you going to measure that? Because then we're really going to be able to say, well, when this little thing had this little blip happens over here with the goldfish, we're just going to move along because it's not a big deal. But this is the big one that we're really tracking. That's the big piece that we want to start. 

So I think when you're going to clear a path in a forest, you don't go through and start picking up the tiny little pebbles on the road right away. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to move the big stuff out of the way. As you're thinking about what behavior are we going to track and how are we going to measure it, defining it in such a way is going to be really important because if you're going to create an FBA, you don't want to create an [00:06:00] FBA for these tiny little pebbles that aren't meaningful in making the path.

You may go back and decide, okay, we've removed all those big boulders out of the way. Now we're going to go back and we're going to move some of the bigger sticks. And once we get clear, we're going to start clearing the path, but piece by piece. So the very first thing is you're defining it is what behavior are we going to track and really purposely target? And what are we just going to not worry about?

Sami: There's so many different ways that people try to collect data as well. And I think that there's data that's intended for measuring behavior, and then there's data that's intended for affecting meaningful behavior change. The red, yellow, green interval data as one of the forms that we've used. We've done them in 30 minute intervals. We've done them in You know, class period, depending on if that's something that's more specific to that situation, but basically using this operationally defined. What are these red no go behaviors? These are the behaviors that this learner engages in because it's [00:07:00] specific the data collection, to that learner. These are the behaviors that we're seeing them engage in that we absolutely do not want to see. And we keep them really bullet pointed. So hitting, self injury, hitting themselves, biting someone, whatever specific to that learner. And then those yellow behaviors, which is kind of the middle of the road or the caution, and those are kind of important for me when I'm looking at like yellow specific behaviors, because there's one or two things is going to happen. A yellow is notifying us of, oh, there's something that's brewing under the surface. So I'm going to either me pivot and make a change in order to impact that behavior in a positive to turn them towards this green acceptable, or I'm going to do absolutely nothing and it's either going to stay yellow, bubbling under the surface, or it's going to get hot, and we're going to go into the red side. The green are what are the expected behaviors? And expected behaviors would be, listening and not speaking when the teacher is speaking or raising their hand instead of [00:08:00] shouting things out. We use this on an every 30 minute or every class period, or it could be every 15 minute, whatever specific the need is for that student that we're trying to develop this plan for and then we basically would mark it. So you would have the class period or the time on the left side of the document. You'd have an area that has a circle or a checkbox for red, yellow, green at the bottom. We've actually defined those that at any point someone gets stuck when they're making that collection. They can look right at the bottom and go. Oh, that's clearly yellow or that's clearly red and they can mark that. And then we always have the staff who's collecting it put their initial because if you start seeing discrepancies in that data collection, maybe it's a staff training issue. We have to go back to para educator so and so who might need some support in how they're collecting it.

Audra: Yeah, and I like that. I'm going to put one of the examples that we've used before in the Facebook group. So if you're not part of the Facebook group, go find us there and join that because that's where we put all these freebies. I think that's a really good one.

That [00:09:00] red, yellow, green system is a kind of a good overview, kind of a day over time. And some of the other ones you might consider is any sort of interval, and that is a form of interval recording, but we won't go into a lot of detail about different data collection measures here. I mean, it's just a silly little podcast. But one of the things is an interval recording where you're breaking down whatever time of day, whether you're breaking down an entire day or you're breaking down maybe a smaller piece of the day. So you can really hone in and see specifics. So you might break down your interval time period into two minutes or 30 seconds or half an hour. It kind of depends on what the baseline data, whatever you've taken already. And you're going to take data on if the behavior is occurring or not occurring, if it's happening the whole time in the interval, or if it's happening at the beginning and not the end, there's different ways that you can do this, and then with that very objective data, you can measure what percentage of time the behavior is occurring within those intervals.

Sami: I was thinking of myself to just kind of a silly remark about sometimes we obviously create these data [00:10:00] forms and we'll have forms available. But we've been in instances where we're not working directly with a learner in that moment and don't have the access to it or we want to be really discreet where we're not like "give me a second while I go ahead and mark down." But we've done things where you've had like a piece of duct tape on your pant leg and done a tally right there. And then you can pull that tape off and be able to set it aside so that you can count. During that 30 minute, this was marked. You've moved like a Skittle from a left side of the pocket to the right side. And how many of those Skittles were in the right pocket? 

I was laughing because before the podcast, I pulled out kind of, this is a old school, but man, that's fun. I'm just going to open this because it's kind of like a box of goodies. But we had all of the golf timers. Do you remember? Yeah. 

Audra: Oh, I love the golf. 

That's a mini one. If you're not watching on YouTube, these are great. And I'll put some of these links from on from Amazon for these because this little timer, it's a counter, not a timer. it's a little finger counter. It's a golf counter, but it goes on your finger like a ring, and it's so discreet [00:11:00] and tiny. We love these little ones, because you're doing a quick frequency or rate, a count, that's really easy. 

Sami: Yep, and the gym boss. You remember the old school Jimboss? It's like that brings back the 90s. 

Audra: Is that a timer? 

Sami: It's, it is, but it'll actually vibrate. To go off to remind you to mark something and so it's channeling the 90s, 

Audra: but of course we all have phones now and they're really easy to do all that stuff on phones.

Sami: I was digging that out and I found it and I thought it was fun. 

Audra: I think that finger counter was one of the best finds I ever made that and the mini clipboards, not the full size clipboard, but the mini ones. They even have a hole in it, you can put one on your lanyard, they're that small, and that's a really quick and easy way to take data as well.

So if we're talking about, you know, interval, I think it's the one we've used the most different versions of interval recording, just because it's so easy to kind of set it up and then track it and then measure it. That's really good for Behaviors that are occurring at a high rate or you're spread out over time. But if you're talking about time based behaviors, so duration or latency, so say [00:12:00] you're talking about the length of how long a tantrum or meltdown is lasting, you know, you want to track the time, how much time a student is able to spend on task. That's a good duration. Latency is How long it takes when you give a direction until the student engages in what's expected of them. We want to reduce that amount of time. So you might have a time based one. And then , you've talked about is more kind of those, those crisis specific data. So if you have somebody, and we will talk later on about that kind of that crisis mountain, because as you start develop an FBA, you really want to describe that specific student's crisis, what that looks like, that whole mountain, that rising up, that feeling, the crisis, and the down, so if you have something like that, a red, yellow, green, or something that where you've really described what those pieces are, and then you're measuring what that student, how often, the frequency, the duration, the aftermath, what happens with that. And so there's different ways. We won't go into specifics here about all the different ways that you can take data, and many of you out there are BCBAs, you know them [00:13:00] well. But if you have a behavior support person in your district, they can help you figure out kind of what's the best data collection measure for this specific student and this behavior.

Sami: I was just going to add to and I'm sure that, you know, when you talk about that crisis mountain, there's very, very big behaviors that in the schools that we're trying to make change for but, you know, sometimes even that permanent product, the aftermath of a crisis, I've gone in and taken a picture of the classroom, so to speak, if the classroom has been turned upside down, if there are bite marks or something on another peer because those permanent product data also creates kind of a bit of a visual image of, you know, For the family, and you've already received consents, you know, by this point so the parents are aware that you're involved and so this is all culmination of that process. But I just think it's an important piece to not disregard that permanent product data as part of your record. 

Audra: And like we talked about, just always making sure that operational definition is clear, and we're going to talk about that a lot more next week, [00:14:00] kind of making that clear operational definition of why that's important, how to do that.

And then I think the last thing is just making sure the training is in place so that your teacher, whoever, your paras, whoever's actually taking that data, everybody's doing it the same. We just want to make sure that if I give you a data sheet, you know exactly how to use it. Because if I give it over here to this para, I want to make sure you're both tracking the same thing. And do they have questions? I think just using kind of that BST model of making sure that you're teaching them how to do it, but then you're also modeling it, you're shadowing them doing it so that they feel comfortable when you do send them into the classroom. You're not just handing them a data sheet.

Sami: I think one of the biggest things that we did face as a challenge with even that interval data is missed and skipped interval. So why was it missed? What happened? Oh, there was a fire drill. I mean, all of that's data. It's important to know. But if you start looking at making a measure and Please don't follow my math here. But if you've got 10 intervals a day and you're one day doing 5, that's 50%. And the [00:15:00] other day you're doing 7. And so you're at, you know, a 70%. You're weighing it all across the board. And it's not a fair or a true measure when it comes to the data. So it really needs to be if this is the data collection method that we're choosing to do. We're going to follow it through, and if there's issues with regards to that collection, then that's we're going to come back and we're going to say, okay, is this the best method for us? Is 15 minutes too restrictive? Do we need to look at changing the interval of the time? 

Audra: I think the other thing we really saw, and this was a consistent problem over time, a difficulty in making sure that the people taking the data understand that you need to take it in the moment it's happening, and I know that's really hard. Some situations, obviously, it's not a perfect system anywhere, anytime, especially when a student's in crisis, but trying to go back and remember how things happened, and if that was or wasn't a behavior, and especially with the red, yellow, green system, we saw a lot of times that staff would try to fill in the last five or six [00:16:00] intervals that they missed or something. That's just really hard. And that's problem solving with your staff. Why is it happening? Do you need a specific time set aside whenever you're collecting it to mark it or whatever it is, you kind of have to problem solve that. That is definitely remind your staff that thinking back on stuff, how it happened is not going to be accurate over time. It's just not. 

Sami: I just think that all of us as professionals, thinking about the ethical component, too, is making sure that we're never changing data. It is what it is, and we don't need the data to prove the point. If there's a behavior that warrants meaningful support, Socially significant change for this learner, the data is going to show that and we're going to capture that. So just ethically making sure that you're recording it. If there's a problem, the problem will be identified. You don't need to make any manipulations to the data itself. 

Audra: I think the other thing we need to remember is in this stage of the FBA process, when we're creating this data, once we set it in the beginning, we can still make changes as it goes [00:17:00] along, because we may have thought we figured out through the ABC data what we're going to track, and we start taking this really good concrete objective data, and then halfway in, we're like, you know what, we're really not capturing what I thought we were going to capture. It's okay to make those tweaks. This is the time to make the tweaks, you know, so that , give it a couple of weeks and take this data and really refine it so that you have enough time with behavior being tracked the way you want it to track so that when you decide if you're going to create a behavior plan or not, you have some clear and understandable data that you can really show to your team. Like this makes sense. We've captured the data. This is what it looks like. We feel confident that what we've measured is correct. 

Sami: And I just wanted to add to, you know, you're talking a lot about this baseline data. This is the data that's occurring before you've made your recommendations and implemented the behavior change. And so a lot of people will not understand why are we still taking data? Why aren't we at the fix yet? And so part of it is we need the baseline enough of it to make sure that [00:18:00] we're identifying the information for us. But then also to be able to see when we go to make that phase change line in the data to say, okay, this is what occurred before we made the change. Are we making change? And that's where your trend lines are going to be able to depict that. Yes, the recommendations that we made are working or Oh, it's taking a nosedive. This is actually not working or it's not . 

Audra: That's absolutely perfect. And that just leads us into the next thing is once we've kind of tweaked it all we have that baseline data that we can put into the official FBA, then now it's time to create the summary statement, the moving forward, and making decisions, all the hypothesis, all that stuff, and we are going to talk about that next time, so tune in next time, and if you have something going on, like if you're in the middle of creating an FBA right now, get into the Facebook group and ask some questions and see if we can all kind of help you navigate what can be and it's the beginning of the school year. We do a lot more of these right now because all the behaviors are popping up. So we will see you next time. 

Intro: Thanks for listening to the Misfit Behaviorists [00:19:00] and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.