Effects of Antecedent-Based Intervention in Ecological Assessment Process on the Challenging Behaviors of Students with Intellectual Disabilities during Art Class

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of antecedent-based intervention in the ecological assessment process on the maladaptive behaviors of students with intellectual disabilities. The participants were second-grade middle school students with intellectual disabilities who are enrolled in a special school. The subjects' personal, environmental, and teacher-related factors were analyzed using ecological assessment- direct observation, reviews of existing records, interviews, questionnaires, and functional analysis. The antecedent-based intervention was developed based on the results of ecological assessment. There were three types of challenging behaviors: seat breakaway, noise generation, and task interruption. These behaviors were observed and recorded using the partial interval recording method(20-second intervals comprising 17-second observations with 3-second recordings). Multiple-baseline research design, a type of single-subject design, was employed across three participants for baseline, intervention, and maintenance phases. The data were analyzed using six visual analysis methods: level of data, trend, distribution of data, immediacy effect, percentage of non-overlapping data, and persistence of data. These methods were recently suggested by What Works Clearinghouse (Kratochwill et al., 2013) as quality indicators for single-subject research designs. The results showed that antecedent-based intervention in the ecological assessment process significantly decreased the challenging behaviors of students with intellectual disabilities during art class through a comparison of the intervention interval. The mean value of challenging behaviors was significantly less in all subjects, the percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) value was 100%, and Tau-U value was -1.00, indicating that the effects of the intervention were significant. Compared to the baseline value, the PND value between the baseline and maintenance was 100%, indicating that the intervention effects were significantly consistent. These analyses were discussed in terms of educational implications to apply in special education practices.