A Preliminary Discriminant and Convergent Validity Study of the Teacher Functional Behavioral Assessment Checklist

Abstract

Discriminant and convergent validity of the Teacher Functional Behavior Assessment Checklist (TFBAC) were examined using 89 first-through third-grade students. Students (n = 14) who received three or more TFBACs during a 6-week period differed from the other students (n = 75) on the scale profiles of the Behavioral Assessment System for Children (Reynolds & Kamphaus, 1992, 1998), the Social Skills Rating System (Gresham & Elliott, 1990), the Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale (Epstein & Sharma, 1998), and a 15-minute classroom behavioral observation, suggesting discriminant validity. Good to excellent agreement was found for teachers' repeated ratings of problem behaviors, suggesting reliable identification of problem behavior. The agreement on problem behavior using teacher ratings and a sequential time-lag analysis was fair. However, agreement between teacher ratings and sequential time-lag analysis was poor for determining the purported function of the problem behaviors. Therefore, there was evidence of convergent validity of problem behaviors, although evidence for the convergent validity of the purported maintaining function of these behaviors was lacking. Results are discussed in terms of increasing the convergent validity of the TFBAC, teacher training in concepts about functional behavioral assessment, the possibility of concurrent functions maintaining problem behaviors, and the use of sequential time-lag analysis with a paper-and-pencil classroom observation methodology.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.