Association for Behavior Analysis International

Functional assessment has become the cornerstone of intervention practices in the field of applied behavior analysis. The methods by which we disseminate and train practitioners in the use of functional assessment is important for clients, students, and staff. As such, a careful consideration of learning prerequisite knowledge and skills, objectives, content, method, and outcome of efforts to teach this domain is required for anyone teaching new or developing students and practitioners. A review of the research literature and available instructional materials (e.g., textbooks, software, videos, online resources) was conducted to identify existing approaches for teaching functional assessment to psychology students and staff. A summary of the instructional methods that currently exist and the research evidence on their effectiveness will be presented and evaluated. The accomplishments, missing links and possible avenues to be explored will be discussed.

Graduate students hoping to secure an academic or research position face employment opportunities that increasingly require pursuit of external funds to support their work. The ability to prepare high-quality grant proposals depends on not only a deep knowledge of an area of inquiry and of research design methodologies, but also an understanding of and ability to critically evaluate proposals according to the scoring criteria against which they will be judged (e.g., how the National Institutes of Health or the Institute of Education Sciences instruct reviewers to score proposals). The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the impact of a grant-writing class on graduate student ability to critically review grant proposals according to federal guidelines. Graduate students from a College of Education reviewed and scored a grant proposal using IES guidelines on the first day of class and again on the last day of a summer-semester grant-writing class. We compared their pre-post performance along several dimensions of skill including the ability to identify issues and problems with the significance, methodology, personnel, and resources specified in the proposal.