A functional behavioral assessment can give the IEP team valuable information about behavior issues so that they can develop a behavior modification plan for the student. A behavior modification plan will address the behavior issues and give everyone that works with the student a plan of action to help deal with these behavior issues.

A purpose of a functional behavior assessment (FBA) is to determine why or what purpose the problem behaviors serve. This is typically done when the behaviors are interfering with the learning of the student or the learning of others. Simply punishing the problem behaviors to make them go away is not sufficient and such strategies will often result in the student just using another problem behavior that serves another function. If we know the function of the problem behavior we can teach appropriate replacement behaviors that serve the same function as the problem behavior, but are more appropriate and as a consequence result in long lasting change.