Welcome to Behavior Care, Inc.
Behavior Care designs, implements, supports, and manages behavioral systems in public schools. Our flagship product, Total Progress System (TPS), is a portfolio of data collection, analysis, and productivity applications enabling school staff to
Behavior Care designs, implements, supports, and manages behavioral systems in public schools. Our flagship product, Total Progress System (TPS), is a portfolio of data collection, analysis, and productivity applications enabling school staff to
- efficiently and effectively conduct functional behavior assessments,
- develop meaningful behavior intervention plans,
- monitor students' performance on behavioral interventions at the student, classroom, school, and district levels
- implement school-wide Positive Behavior Intervention & Support (PBIS) programs,
- write actionable social & emotional goals in Individualized Education Plans,
- write detailed behavior recording rubrics
- print students' self-reflection data sheets
- conduct detailed sequential analyses of behavioral events, and more!
Are you experiencing challenges with implementation of behavioral services in your school district?
If so, please review the two sets of questions below. If you answer yes to any question in the first set, or answer no to any question in the second set, read on to see how Behavior Care can help.
Question Set #1
- Do your teachers struggle to record students' behavioral intervention data, burdened by a requirement to count or time each occurrence of behavior?
- Do you require teachers to create their own versions of progress monitoring graphs?
- Do students' behavioral data routinely show gaps where data were not recorded?
- Do behavioral interventions rely too frequently on "asks for breaks" as an intervention strategy?
Did you answer "yes" to any questions in set #1?
1. Do your teachers struggle to record students' behavioral intervention data, burdened by a requirement to count each occurrence of behavior?
Counting and timing behavior are standard measures used by Behavior Analysts to monitor students' behaviors of concern, e.g., disruption, verbal aggression, physical aggression, elopement, etc. Frequency (count/time) recording requires that teacher to decide in real time whether each occurrence of a target behavior meets criteria to be counted. Total count is then divided by recording time to compute the behavior frequency. While counting behaviors seems sensible enough, in practice this requires teachers to maintain excessive vigilance on a single student's behavior, directly interfering with the teacher's many other responsibilities, e.g., counting behaviors for other students, responding to other behavioral issues in the classroom, delivering group instruction, supporting instruction for individual students, etc. Counting occurrences of behavior, as well as recording durations of behavior episodes remains an important tool in the behavior specialists tool box. Indeed, the TPS portfolio offers an excellent frequency and duration module when this kind of data is necessary. However frequency and duration recording is far too inefficient for teachers to use as a standard data recording system.
Another problem with frequency recording is that it does not accurately measure episodic behavior. While some unwanted behaviors are brief, such as a hit, plop to the ground, throw food in the cafeteria, calls out in class, etc., many other kinds of behavioral challenges are episodic, e.g., classroom disruption, taunting, tantrums, leaving the classroom, etc. Frequency recording of these kinds of episodic behaviors is inaccurate because the required counting process necessarily ignores the elapsed time of each episode. To solve this behavior recording problem, behavior analysts typically record episode duration. Again, while TPS has an excellent application to record durations, this kind of data recording requires constant vigilance to accurately record start and stop times for each episode, which is entirely impractical for teachers to accomplish.
Partial Interval Recording (PIR) is another data recording method that is commonly used in classrooms. PIR does reduce the data recording burden by establishing relatively small recording intervals, e.g., 2 minutes, in which teachers record a 1 if the target behavior occurred, or a 0 if the target behavior did not occur. Once again, TPS offers a wonderful PIR module for situations where this kind of data recording is deemed necessary. While PIR offers teachers a welcome relief of the responsibility of counting or timing target behaviors, it also significantly largely ignores the occurrence and intensity of behavior. For example, during a 2-minute recording interval a student may exhibit physical aggression toward property (hit his computer) multiple times, but with PIR recording, teachers would only record that the behavior occurred during the interval - data recording that would essential ignore the frequency and intensity of this behavior.
To be sure, frequency recording, duration recording, and partial interval recording are valuable tools for monitoring students' behavior - and again, TPS has excellent modules to support each of these specialized behavior recording methods. Though these behavior recording techniques continue to receive widespread acceptance as appropriate measures for classroom settings, each presents an often overlooked limitation. That is, frequency, duration, and partial interval measures are binary - either the specified target behavior occurs, or it does not. Binary measures do not account for natural and unavoidable variation between occurrences. For example, when measuring physical aggression to person, a small slap on the teacher's hand produces a very different outcome than a strong punch to the teacher's face. Frequency cannot measure this difference because counting relies on a specific criterion. In this example, the criterion would either include a full range of ways a student could physically contact the teacher, e.g., slap, unwanted touch, hit, headbutt, etc. This would help somewhat by including a range of aggressive behaviors. However, this would create another problem because we could not distinguish from the recorded count the range of behavior intensities that occurred. Duration cannot measure this difference in intensity of physical aggression to person because it only considers the temporal extent of an episode. Partial Interval Recording only identifies whether or not behavior occurred, so it too cannot identify variation in behavior intensity.
TPS solves this pervasive data recording problem by using an innovative 0-4 rating system enabling teachers to categorize their observations of students' behavior during (as many as) ten recording periods, based on ranges of frequency, duration, intensity, and competency. Rating rubrics provide teachers with decision criteria for each rating category. TPS measurement of behavior is so efficient and accurate that classroom staff collect more than 3,000,000 TPS ratings per year!
2. Do you require teachers to create their own versions of progress monitoring graphs?
Behaviorally meaningful graphs take time to create and require specialized data visualization skills. With dozens of behaviorally meaningful graphs, custom designed and formatted to maximize information about a student's progress, TPS readily solves the graphing problem. Graph standardization enables any teacher, behavior specialist, administrator, parent, physician, to quickly evaluate a student's performance without having to first determine how data were summarized to produce the graphs, or what each graph element means. Graph standardization is especially useful for reviewing behavioral data for students transferring within district during the school year, as well as for creating an archive of students' behavioral data in cumulative files.
3. Do students' behavioral data routinely show gaps where teachers have not recorded data?
Gaps in data are a sign that teachers are either unable or are unwilling to collect data. Even the most diligent and behaviorally supportive teachers find the responsibility of counting and timing multiple behaviors for multiple students throughout the school day to be an overwhelming task, resulting in gaps in data. If that student's case were to turn litigious, reconstructing missing data leads to difficult questions about accuracy as well as reliability of behavior plan implementation. TPS solves this problem by providing teachers with an efficient, accurate, and behaviorally meaningful way to record students' performance.
4. Do behavioral intervention plans rely on "asks for breaks" as a replacement behavior?
It is well established that aggression, classroom disruption, leaving the assigned area, etc., enable students to effectively escape from unwanted instructional demands. Not surprisingly, behavioral interventions commonly support the development of a functionally equivalent behavior, i.e., support the student use of a school-appropriate way to ask for a break. Though a sensible approach to the core problem as supported by escape, this approach does not address motivational conditions that make escape (negatively) reinforcing. Encountering the next unwanted academic demand, the student is more likely to ask for a break, receive that break, and thus be (negatively) reinforced for using that break. The valued, short term reduction in aggression then advertently contributes to a reduction in the student's instructional time because breaks are incompatible with academic learning.
TPS addresses this problem by providing feedback to students for employing more complex kinds of replacement behaviors, e.g., problem-solving, executive skills, social skills, emotional regulation skills, self-awareness, that supports respect, resilience, and responsibility. These complex behaviors replace escape maintained behaviors, e.g., aggression, disruption, as well as the more appropriate behavior of asking for a break, with positively reinforced relational behaviors that support an increase in educational and social success. Respect, resilience, and responsibility are replacement behaviors for aggression, but also serve as replacements for students' common behavioral deficiencies with these key repertories. All stakeholders want students to exhibit respect, resilience, and responsibility. How are these behaviors taught and how do students evaluate their competencies with these essential behaviors? TPS ratings provide a means to monitor students' level of these behaviors, thus supporting self-reflection and self-correction, as well as providing teachers and parents with information necessary for them to recognize and reinforce students' use of these behaviors.
Question Set #2
- Are teachers' daily home notes of students' behavior produced from actual performance data?
- Are behavioral goals for students' Individual Education Plans (IEP) based on actual performance on behavioral interventions recorded throughout the school year?
- Do you currently monitor students' intervention data with an online dashboard?
- Do students' behavioral data reflect multiple dimensions of behavior, e.g., frequency, duration, intensity, latency, and competency?
Did you answer "no" to any questions in set #2?
1. Do teachers' daily home notes summarizing produced from actual behavioral data?
In elementary and self-contained classrooms, teachers typically send daily notes of students' performance to inform parents about daily progress, behavioral concerns, etc. Often prepared at the end of the school day, these notes provide general summaries of students' progress that often do not reflect actual performance data. The TPS Home Note solves this problem by sharing actual behavioral data with parents. TPS Daily Home Notes and Weekly Home Notes convert numeric ratings of increasing and decreasing target behaviors to easily understood progress monitoring symbols, displays the teacher's notes entered during each of ten possible recording periods, and displays graphs showing the student's daily level of performance.
2. Are behavioral goals for students' Individual Education Plans (IEP) based on actual performance levels recorded throughout the school year?
It is difficult to write a behavioral IEP goal if behavioral data are not consistently collected during the school year. Without information on a student's present levels of behavior there is no factual basis for writing an IEP goal to increase the student's level of performance for the next school year. Based on present levels of each increasing and decreasing target behavior TPS automatically writes a behaviorally valid annual IEP goal with three intermediate quarterly objectives.
3. Do you currently monitor all students' intervention data with an online dashboard?
School district staff want to proactively manage students' behavioral interventions, but have no systematic way to do so. The innovative Power TPS dashboard solves this problem by enabling school and district administrators to monitor students' weekly summaries of increasing and decreasing target behaviors, essential for proactively allocating additional personnel and other resources to assist with behavioral interventions.
4. Do students' behavioral data efficiently reflect multiple dimensions of behavior, e.g., frequency, duration, intensity, independence, latency, and competency?
TPS data recording rubrics enable teachers to select among six dimensions of behavior to categorize their observations of students' increasing and decreasing target behaviors. The TPS Dimension Integration Tool provides teachers with measurement scenarios to accurately monitor a student's performance level based on multiple behavior dimensions.