The FBA Acronym EATS: Escape, Attention, Tangible, Sensory
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the EATS framework used in Functional Behavior Assessments and how it's sometimes over-applied to normal misbehavior.
Key Takeaways
- EATS is a useful clinical tool - Escape, Attention, Tangible, and Sensory are legitimate categories for understanding behavior function
- But it's being over-applied - Not every misbehaving student needs a clinical analysis of behavior function
- Simple explanations often suffice - Sometimes a student is misbehaving because there are no consequences, not because of an unmet sensory need
Transcript
School discipline is not a behavioral therapy approach.
When we're talking about school discipline, we're talking about keeping the school environment safe and orderly, not about solving individual behavior problems.
But one of the things that people often bring up in the comments on my videos is that we need to determine the function of the behavior or the idea that all behavior is communication.
And I think there's something important that's missing from FBAs.
So if you've ever done a functional behavior assessment, you know there are four functions to behavior according to that kind of way of looking at things, and they use the acronym EATS.
So escape or avoidance, attention, tangible items, and sensory needs.
And I think that's probably a pretty good framework for looking at behavior if you're working with students with autism or if you are a behavior therapist and you're working to develop a behavior plan for an individual student.
But those are not especially useful for school discipline.
And the reason I think that we need to be careful about putting too much weight into that framework is that we can get into this kind of reverse psychology game, right?
Like a lot of people will say, why would you send a student home if the function of their behavior is avoidance or escape?
If they're just trying to go home, well, you're rewarding them if you suspend them for their, say, violent behavior.
And that may be true, but we can't really know.
We don't always know the function of a behavior, and we can't get into this situation where we tolerate a behavior in order to avoid reinforcement if the behavior is not tolerable.
In a school environment, we're responsible for keeping people safe, and we can't tolerate behaviors that make other people unsafe just because of our assumptions about what would be rewarding or reinforcing to the particular student.
And when it comes to the FBA in particular, there's one function that's missing from that EATS acronym.
There's one function that I think often is overlooked and kind of trumps all the others, and that is power.
One of the reasons that we have to sometimes exclude students from class or exclude students from school for a time is that their behavior, if left unchecked, will give them too much power, right?
The power to hurt other people, the power to disrupt the school environment.
the power to make other people unsafe or feel unsafe.
And we have to not ignore the temptation of power, the function of power, simply because it's not in an FBA.
So let me know what you think about this.
Are we overlooking motivations that stem from wanting power because they're not in the FBA?
Let me know what you think.