Disruptive Incident Barometer

Disruptive Incident Barometer

When analyzing inappropriate behavior excesses the first step is to determine if the behavior interferes with the person’s ability to function or interact appropriately in typical environmental conditions. To do this observational data needs to be taken for an extended amount of time to determine whether the behavior is disruptive. This is a very important part of the process because if the behavior only has occurred once or very infrequently then it would not be considered a disruptive behavior which needs to be altered. When observing a new behavior evidence has shown that if you do not bring attention or acknowledge the behavior, it may not re-occur because the person exhibiting the behavior has not achieved
For example a tantrum behavior of a specific individual could be defined as: Crying with or without tears, screaming loudly, making statements like “no, no, no”, pounding fists on the table, swiping lesson materials, getting up and running from their desk, and falling to the ground. When you are defining a behavior and also writing a descriptive analysis of the behavior, it must always be specific, observable, and measurable. Based on these principles an example of a descriptive analysis of a self injurious behavior it would be: “Tim stood up and hit the back of his head on the wall four times then dropped to the ground, rolled over, hit his forehead on the carpeted area three times, then with his right hand closed in a fist he hit his forehead five
In a class of nine students he was not getting as much reinforcement during the group instruction portion of our days and he had had to work much longer to earn reinforcement. To work on decreasing the behavior I had to design a behavior plan that focused on prevention and I first addressed the issue of creating a denser schedule of reinforcement and a visual motivator (a large token chart on the white board with his name on it) which would serve as a type of Disruptive Incident Barometer. The only difference between the Disruptive Incident Barometer example provided in our textbook and the token chart that I am using is that the token chart only focuses on gaining tokens for positive behaviors and the student does not lose tokens for inappropriate behaviors. The idea is that I am only focusing on reinforcing the behavior I want to see re-occur and not bringing attention to the inappropriate vocalizations he is