The Use of Functional Communication Training without Additional Treatment Procedures in an Inclusive School Setting

Functional communication training (FCT) is an intervention frequently used for students with developmental disabilities to reduce problematic behaviors and to increase prosocial behaviors. This intervention appears to be very effective when the communication responses trained are matched to the function of the student's problematic behaviors. In most cases, however, FCT is implemented as part of an intervention package. As a result, there is little research showing FCT to be effective without additional treatment components. In this investigation, the results of a brief functional analysis conducted with a student with autism in an inclusive school setting revealed that the student's self-injury served as a negative reinforcement function. We used a multiple baseline design across classrooms to evaluate the effects of FCT in the absence of augmentative procedures. The results of this study indicate that ameliorating the student's self-injury occurred with implementing the FCT procedure in isolation, providing growing support for using FCT without augmentative procedures.