Handbook of Positive Behavior Support

Book Preface

In 1998, the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) of the U.S. Department of Education awarded a cooperative agreement to the University of Oregon to establish a national technical assistance Center on Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS). This center competition came on the heels of 15 years of intensive research and development by three cycles of the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Positive Behavior Support (PBS) funded by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research and numerous research and demonstration projects funded by the OSEP. The editors and many of the authors of this volume were key researchers and developers involved in the history of investments in this area.

The technical assistance (TA) center on PBIS was funded based in part on the recognition of the large and growing base of evidence from controlled studies employing a variety of methodologies that PBIS (also referenced similarly as PBS) provides an effective, positive, strength-based, relevant, and efficient technology to assist persons requiring specialized behavioral support and services.

OSEP recognized in the late 1990s that the research agenda and funding for PBS was expanding rapidly from an increasing number of federal and state agencies. With interest in PBS expanding across the country, a mechanism was needed so states could move this growing research base into practice in schools and other programs serving children and to influence the preparation of personnel to implement this growing knowledge base. Since its inception in 1997, the National TA Center on PBIS has helped fulfill this initial goal by establishing school leadership teams in more than 7,700 schools in more than 35 states; publishing numerous papers in scholarly journals; developing needed technical assistance guides and implementation and evaluation tools; and documenting more than 7 million hits on its Web site (www.pbis.org).

This volume is a product of the National TA Center on PBIS and has been designed to acquaint clinical child psychologists and other human services professionals, including educators, with an overview and summary of the current knowledge base that is subsumed under the term PBS. This volume represents the first attempt to produce a single scholarly summation of PBS professional practices, research, and examples.

With conceptual and empirical underpinnings in applied behavior analysis, PBS emerged during the 1980s as a comprehensive approach for organizing and providing community supports and resources for persons with disabilities who engage in challenging behavior. As a field, PBS has experienced phenomenal growth over a span of 25 years and is now an integral component of public education in many schools in practically every state in the United States, improving not only the behavior of those children with the most challenging behaviors but also the behavior of all children.

As an applied science of human behavior, PBS unites the precision of a careful, analytical examination of the functions of problem behavior, a broader framework of person-centered values and processes, and an emphasis on teaching alternative skill repertoires. PBS involves a conceptual shift in our approach to addressing difficult behavior associated with disabilities away from a simple reduction of the occurrence of such behavior (e.g., punishment) to a comprehensive strengths-based teaching approach that considers the person and his or her total life span or ecology.