Written by Katie Graves, PhD
A common template can make FBAs and BIPs easier to read and compare. But a consistent format does not necessarily mean the assessments and plans are high quality.
Districts often turn to templates because their FBAs and BIPs vary widely across staff. That is a reasonable concern. Before choosing a form, though, it helps to look at the work itself: Are the assessments identifying useful patterns? Do the intervention plans follow from the assessment findings? Which parts are consistently strong, and where do staff need more support?
The TATE rubric gives districts a way to answer those questions by scoring the quality of FBAs and BIPs. Those results can then guide the template, training, and feedback staff receive. A template can support consistent documentation; the rubric helps determine whether the underlying practice is improving.
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What Does Technically Adequate Mean?
A technically adequate FBA identifies and operationally defines the behavior, provides baseline data, considers setting events, describes the antecedents that trigger the behavior and the conditions present when it does not occur, describes what others do afterward, and produces a hypothesis statement that uses that information and names a valid function. A technically adequate BIP is written promptly, references that hypothesis, and describes at least one prevention strategy, one replacement behavior to teach, one reinforcement strategy, and one change in how adults respond when the behavior occurs, each linked to the hypothesis and detailed enough to be implemented consistently by more than one person. It also includes a safety plan, when warranted; a plan to evaluate effectiveness; and a plan to measure whether the plan is being implemented as written.
The list of components came from a literature review conducted by a research team to identify evidence-supported elements. The team translated those components into 18 items—nine for FBAs and nine for BIPs—and asked experts in the field to assess whether each item was essential and clearly worded. The resulting Technical Adequacy Evaluation Tool (TATE) scores each item from 0 to 2 using a rubric.
What the TATE Revealed in Existing Plans
The researchers scored 143 FBAs and 135 BIPs from 13 Florida districts. The average FBA score was 9.3 out of 18 (52%), and the average BIP score was 7.4 out of 18 (41%). Individual item scores show where plans were strongest and where important components were missing. Operational definitions averaged 1.49 out of 2, a valid function averaged 1.48, and BIP timelines averaged 1.54. These components are relatively straightforward to document and check.
Items requiring more analysis or planning received lower scores. Setting events averaged 0.35, with 68% of FBAs scoring zero. Antecedent conditions present when the behavior did not occur also scored zero in 68% of FBAs. Consequences averaged 0.79. For BIPs, strategies for changing how adults respond after the behavior averaged 0.46, with 64% scoring zero. Implementation fidelity plans averaged just 0.09, with 91% of BIPs scoring zero.
That last finding illustrates the limits of a template FBA/BIP form. A district can add a section for implementation fidelity to its template, but the section alone does not ensure staff develop a usable plan to measure it.
Earlier research raised similar concerns. Van Acker and colleagues (2005) found that 46% of the plans they reviewed contained only aversive strategies. Scott, Anderson, and Spaulding (2008) described a range of inexact school practices labeled as FBA, many without a strong connection to the evidence base. Scott and Kamps (2007) also noted the absence of federal guidance specifying the key components of an FBA.
Recommendations for Practice
Establish a baseline before you choose a template. Pull a sample of recent FBAs and BIPs, score them, and look at the item pattern. You are not evaluating the people who wrote them. You are locating the components your system does not currently produce, which is information you cannot get any other way.
Score in pairs and check your agreement: two people, the rubric, independent scores, then a conversation about where you differed. The disagreements are where the actual professional learning happens, and a district that skips this ends up with scores nobody trusts.
Expect the analytic items to be the weak ones. Districts tend to prepare for a general quality problem. What they typically have is specific and predictable: setting events, the conditions under which the behavior does not occur, the consequence analysis, the strategy for responding differently, and fidelity. If your pattern looks like the Florida pattern, your improvement plan has five targets rather than eighteen.
Then design the template around what failed. A form built to prompt the components your district reliably omits is worth considerably more than a comprehensive one that mirrors what people already do well. Make the weak fields impossible to skip and give them room.
Re-score, and plan at three levels. The TATE was built to produce a baseline at district, school, and individual levels so that action planning can happen at whichever level the pattern sits. Some gaps are training gaps for one team. Some are district-wide and structural, and they will not be solved building by building.
What the TATE Will Not Do
The TATE evaluates the written product. It does not measure whether the plan was implemented, nor does it measure student outcomes. A plan that scores 18 and sits in a drawer has helped no one, which is precisely why the fidelity item exists and precisely why its near-total absence in the above research data is concerning.
The TATE should guide improvement across a district, not serve as a compliance audit tied to individual staff evaluations. When scores carry personnel consequences, staff may become defensive, and inflated ratings may obscure the areas that need attention. Research on school-based FBA has documented the limitations of approaches that treat assessment as an expert task imposed on teams rather than a collaborative process. Districts can use TATE scores more productively by examining patterns across plans, sharing the findings with staff, and working together to strengthen practice.
“The TATE should guide improvement across a district, not serve as a compliance audit tied to individual staff evaluations.”
Where The Navigators Fits
Knowing your baseline creates a second problem: capacity. Most districts that score their plans discover both that quality needs to improve and that nobody has time to do the assessments properly. The Navigators is a supervised network of aspiring school-based behavior analysts who conduct functional behavior assessments for districts under experienced oversight, working alongside the team that knows the student rather than producing a report at a distance, which is capacity for the assessment work and development for the analysts at the same time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What tool can a district use to evaluate the quality of its FBAs and BIPs? The Technical Adequacy Evaluation Tool scores 18 components, nine for the FBA and nine for the BIP, from 0 to 2 against a rubric, and produces a baseline at the district, school, and individual level.
Does a common FBA template improve quality? Not by itself. A template standardizes format. In a sample of 135 Florida BIPs, 91 percent contained no plan for measuring implementation fidelity, which a template can easily include and which was omitted anyway.
Which parts of FBAs and BIPs are most often weak? In the Florida data, the weakest components were setting events, the antecedent conditions present when the behavior does not occur, consequence analysis, strategies for changing how adults respond, and implementation fidelity planning.
Who should score FBAs and BIPs for technical adequacy? Two trained raters scoring independently and then reconciling, with the results used for system-level action planning rather than individual staff evaluation.
