Abstract:

The Behavioural Assessment to improve School Environment (BASE) European Erasmus+ project responses to the European requirement of reforming the whole scholastic disciplinary system identifies in the proven US-born concept of the Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) one possible solution, and tries to adapt its practical and evidence-based principles to the heterogeneous European school settings.

Recently, scientific studies (Sugai, Horner, 2016) have emphasized the promising role of PBS in reducing the occurrence of behavioural problems by setting up a preventive, proactive and multilevel system based on the direct involvement of the entire school team: starting from teachers, school leaders until all actors of the community involved in the educational processes. The features of PBS are rooted in the behavioural science and in the practice of Functional Behaviour Analysis (FBA). It works very well in coping with challenging behavioural problems in everyday school life. The growing expectation is that schools will deliver socially acceptable, effective, and efficient interventions to ensure safe and productive environments where the prosocial behaviour is promoted and pupils can become successful adults.

With the purpose of achieving these goals, the rationale for this project is to combine the PBS approach with the FBA practice, taking advantage of the important results achieved by two funded European projects: the Web Health Application for Adhd Monitoring (WHAAM) and the PBS project.

The web-based BASE application will expand the functionalities included in the WHAAM application according to the theoretical and methodological constraints defined by the PBS project.

While the original WHAAM application was focused only on the functional assessment applied to problem behaviors of children with ADHD, the new BASE web application will include features useful for a larger field of intervention.

The BASE application will include functionalities that can be grouped in the following categories:
- Tools to perform the functional assessment of problem behaviours;
- tools to evaluate the well-being status of teachers and students (i.e. rating, emotional thermometer, or visual analogue scales);
- tools to collect information about academic progresses such as discipline referrals, attendance reports, etc.;
- tools to easily create qualitative and quantitative measures for the observation according to the PBS principles;
- tools to easily generate reports about the data collected with the application.

The data collected with the BASE application will be used to take informed decisions about the strategies to increase the well-being of the school, preventing and reducing the occurrence of problem behaviors, teachers' burnout, students' drop out, and property destruction.
Teachers will take advantage of the possibility to access evidence-based features that help them to evaluate the efficacy of their actions on multiple levels (students' performance, reduction of problem behaviours, levels of the classroom wellbeing, etc.), to share the educational events with other colleagues and with students' caregivers promoting a better communication and connection between school and families.

References:
[1] Sugai, G., & Horner, R. H. (2006). A promising approach for expanding and sustaining school-wide positive behavior support. School Psychology Review, 35 (2), 245–259.

Keywords:

Positive Behavior Support, Evidence Based System, web application, problem behaviours.