BEHAVIORAL ASSESSMENT TO IMPROVE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT
(BASE)
Although schools should be one of the safest places for children and students in general, the incidence of acts of school violence such as vandalism, fighting, truancy, playground “bullies”, and student victimization is greater than before. These problems affect an important number of students in school today, compromising negatively the students' physical, mental and social well-being.
The BASE project (Behavioral Assessment to improve School Environment) will develop an innovative web-based software for the application of the positive behavior support at school. The application will offer directly school leaders, teachers, and, more in general, the community of people involved in the educational processes a tool to easy the organization of a school based on values in which the decision making and the problem solving processes are guided by a systematic data collection. The tool will help school directors and teachers to prevent and effectively face the occurrence of problem behaviors as well as teachers’ burnout and students’ disangagement.
The aim of the BASE project (Behavioral Assessment to improve School Environment) is the introduction in the European context of the Positive Behavior Support (PBS), an innovative system to manage the scholastic environment, especially in face of individuals’ challenging behaviours. One of the main impotance of the Project BASE is to expand the functionalities of the Web-based application for monitoring behavior of ADHD children (outcome of the WHAAM project), according to the theoretical and methodological constraints defined by the PBS project. While the original WHAAM application was focused only on the functional assessment applied to problem behaviors of children with ADHD, the new BASE web application will include features useful for a larger field of intervention.
The BASE project ambition is to disseminate across Europe the philosophy underpinning the proven US concept of PBS approach throughout the data collected with the BASE web application. The project, in particular, would like to emphasize the crucial role of the Functional Behavioural Assessment (FBA) prior to intervention allowing educational staff to gather, in a systematic way and according to a systemic perspective, a great amount of data regarding the environmental conditions that trigger and maintain the challenging behaviour.
The impact of BASE Project (Behavioral Assessment to improve School Environment) on school community has to introduce a direct changing in the educational perspective and school efficiency toward a more positive and proactive approach and increase the quality of life at school, according to the concept of health promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) focuses on the physical, mental and social well-being of School-Aged Children.
The partnership of the BASE project will ensure the availability of the results for at least 3 years after the end of the project. The collaboration among partners will be maintained: the scientific partners will become a reference point for the schools involved in the project as a long-lasting guide to shape the change that will occur over the years, after the implementation of the PBS. Moreover, each partner will partecipate to the sustainability activities according to their previous responsabilities in the project.
In particular, the BASE project will support the following sustainability activities:
- Pull requests and fixes: considering that the code of the BASE application will be released as an open source project on Github, the BASE’s developers will review the requests of contributions by the open source community and they will merge the most appropriated commits. Moreover, the issue tracker will be increased and monitored in order to plan new releases and fix the most relevant bugs.
- Translations: the BASE application could be translated in new languages with the contribution of the Internet communities.
- BASE repository: the repository will be updated with new materials, taking advantage of the contribution of Internet users through a crowdsourcing model.
- PBS dataset: every time that the PBS application is used, the PBS dataset will be enriched with new data after being appropriately anonymised;
- Publications and conferences: the partnership will submit papers to international journals or conferences.
- Servers' activity: the servers used in the project will be kept active at least in the 5 years following the end of the project.
- New project proposals: the partnership will prepare new project proposals to enlarge the effects obtained with the BASE project. The BASE project itself is a good example of sustainability because it is the result of an effective collaboration between the WHAAM and the PBS Europe projects teams.
(BASE)
Although schools should be one of the safest places for children and students in general, the incidence of acts of school violence such as vandalism, fighting, truancy, playground “bullies”, and student victimization is greater than before. These problems affect an important number of students in school today, compromising negatively the students' physical, mental and social well-being.
The BASE project (Behavioral Assessment to improve School Environment) will develop an innovative web-based software for the application of the positive behavior support at school. The application will offer directly school leaders, teachers, and, more in general, the community of people involved in the educational processes a tool to easy the organization of a school based on values in which the decision making and the problem solving processes are guided by a systematic data collection. The tool will help school directors and teachers to prevent and effectively face the occurrence of problem behaviors as well as teachers’ burnout and students’ disangagement.
The aim of the BASE project (Behavioral Assessment to improve School Environment) is the introduction in the European context of the Positive Behavior Support (PBS), an innovative system to manage the scholastic environment, especially in face of individuals’ challenging behaviours. One of the main impotance of the Project BASE is to expand the functionalities of the Web-based application for monitoring behavior of ADHD children (outcome of the WHAAM project), according to the theoretical and methodological constraints defined by the PBS project. While the original WHAAM application was focused only on the functional assessment applied to problem behaviors of children with ADHD, the new BASE web application will include features useful for a larger field of intervention.
The BASE project ambition is to disseminate across Europe the philosophy underpinning the proven US concept of PBS approach throughout the data collected with the BASE web application. The project, in particular, would like to emphasize the crucial role of the Functional Behavioural Assessment (FBA) prior to intervention allowing educational staff to gather, in a systematic way and according to a systemic perspective, a great amount of data regarding the environmental conditions that trigger and maintain the challenging behaviour.
The impact of BASE Project (Behavioral Assessment to improve School Environment) on school community has to introduce a direct changing in the educational perspective and school efficiency toward a more positive and proactive approach and increase the quality of life at school, according to the concept of health promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO) focuses on the physical, mental and social well-being of School-Aged Children.
The partnership of the BASE project will ensure the availability of the results for at least 3 years after the end of the project. The collaboration among partners will be maintained: the scientific partners will become a reference point for the schools involved in the project as a long-lasting guide to shape the change that will occur over the years, after the implementation of the PBS. Moreover, each partner will partecipate to the sustainability activities according to their previous responsabilities in the project.
In particular, the BASE project will support the following sustainability activities:
- Pull requests and fixes: considering that the code of the BASE application will be released as an open source project on Github, the BASE’s developers will review the requests of contributions by the open source community and they will merge the most appropriated commits. Moreover, the issue tracker will be increased and monitored in order to plan new releases and fix the most relevant bugs.
- Translations: the BASE application could be translated in new languages with the contribution of the Internet communities.
- BASE repository: the repository will be updated with new materials, taking advantage of the contribution of Internet users through a crowdsourcing model.
- PBS dataset: every time that the PBS application is used, the PBS dataset will be enriched with new data after being appropriately anonymised;
- Publications and conferences: the partnership will submit papers to international journals or conferences.
- Servers' activity: the servers used in the project will be kept active at least in the 5 years following the end of the project.
- New project proposals: the partnership will prepare new project proposals to enlarge the effects obtained with the BASE project. The BASE project itself is a good example of sustainability because it is the result of an effective collaboration between the WHAAM and the PBS Europe projects teams.
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- Erasmus + programme
- Project title : Behaviour management models across Europe
- Applicant organisation: Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche
- Partner organisations: Instituto Politecnico do Porto, Universita Degli Studi Di Palermo, Fundatia de abilitare Speranta, Timisoara, Romania,
- Medical statistical data reveals that Social Emotional and Behavioral Difficulties (SEBD) are often associated with other medical conditions such as ADHD, depression, learning difficulties, mental retardation, psychosis, autism and so on. The prevalence of these disorders is 2-16% of the general population. Children with SEBD, diagnosed or not, are likely to live in social isolation, to receive a poor education, and they risk becoming deviant teenagers, or unemployed adults. Teachers and staff with responsibility for behavioral matters in school are often alone in the management of these difficulties, and poorly prepared for dealing complicated educational challenges. The bad management of the SEBD provokes further costs for the health system and, more in general, for the whole society.
- A way to approach SEBD with consistent level of educational success is to equip teachers with proper training on practical and proven classroom management strategies that can help them to effectively control difficult behaviours with confidence and competence.
- The BEHAVE project aims exactly to reinforce and enlarge networks and to promote a transnational culture about some of the most effective strategies to approach SEBDs in classroom. To pursue this aim the project provides a set of tools to empower teacher’s professional profile also enhancing the sharing of evidence and knowledge. The BEHAVE target are teachers of primary schools who are daily involved in the fight to guarantee SEBD students a better quality of life. The estimated number of both direct and indirect participants is about 650 among teachers in training (about 500) and stakeholders.
- More in depth, the project carry out the following activities:
- - The adaptation of the WHAAM application developed in a previous LLL European project. Currently, this application offers an ICT-based solution supporting the observation of ADHD behaviours in order to better comprehend their meaning and plan appropriate, well-timed, and statistically consistent interventions. The BEHAVE intends to add new features to the WHAAM app in order to widen its scope and make it available for other psychological disorders.
- - The development of a Behavior Management Hub (BMH) to sustain a community of teachers and experts that tackle daily behavioral problems at schools. It collects also relevant materials and educational resources adaptable to both formal and informal learning, contributing to the lifelong learning of teachers and everyone who is a motivated user. The hub represent also the main tool to sustain the establishment of a community of practice interested in the topics of the project.
- - The design and delivery of 5 three-day specialization courses about the most popular and effective models of behavioral management across Europe for the benefit of primary schools’ teachers. The courses will take place in each partner country (IT, UK, PT, RO, BE).
- - The implementation of the BEHAVE survey to investigate how the government of the nations involved in the project address the behavior management at school.
- - The organization of 4 multiplier events, some devoted to verify the coherence between project objectives and outputs, other to disseminate the results and increase the expected impact.
- A consistent project management methodology will be set up to carry out the project. This methodology is aimed at translating all the project workflow in appropriate, professional, repeatable, standardized, and documented collection of processes, tools, technique and templates.
- Generally, we expect to make a direct impact, both at local and transnational level, mainly on Children with Social Emotional and Behavioral Difficulties (SEBD), teachers and educational staff, partner organizations and other stakeholders. To obtain the envisaged impact a combination of tangible and intangible project results will be achieved: primarily in enhancing intrinsic teachers experience and expertise in managing SEBD, promoting the development of professional networks, increasing compliance and trust among educational and health professionals, building skilled community of practices. All these results are linked to a smart application of ICTs to boost and promote new practices and approaches in the Evidence Based Education.
- The BEHAVE project have also long-term benefits. It, in fact, can represent an important reference point for orienting policies and intervention in the sector of the education for special needs. Coherently with the strategic objectives in the ET 2020 framework, the project promote equity, social cohesion and active citizenship, for children and adolescents with SEBD, and for their caregivers. Its actions are improving the quality and the efficiency of education by means of the provision of training and learning paths for teachers and educational staff.