At the 2016 TASH Conference in St. Louis, a research colloquium was held that focused on the state of selected life-span services for people with severe disabilities. Topics addressed by leading experts in the field included inclusion, teaching academic skills, family support, challenging behavior, supported employment, and voting. This article summarizes the information presenters shared at the colloquium. The presenters prepared a short response with a minimum number of citations based on the material they presented, which focused on the description of the practice, extent to which practices are implemented, challenges to implementing the practice, and recommended practices. Although all contributors suggested that much progress has been made, they concurred that there is still much to do in serving people with severe disabilities and their families.

Historically, individuals with significant cognitive disabilities SCD were thought to be unable to be active participants in their communities. Goldberg and Cruickshank in their classic debate raised the question about the responsibility of public schools in educating children with SCD. Sontag, Burke, and York commented that there was no systematic plan for developing services for this population and organizations in special education or mental retardation had no interest or were ambivalent about the benefits of educational programming for this population. Up until the late 1940s people with SCD were thought to be "untrainable". During this time period, care for individuals with SCD did not include constructive efforts to change behavior. Meaningful participation in the general education community is dependent on two elements: social inclusion and academic participation. General curriculum access is an extension of students with SCD being socially included in general education environments.

The authors review the research pertaining to the selection of three different schedules of training trials sequencing. The effects of massed, distributed, and spaced trials sequencing on the learning of handicapped and nonhandicapped individuals for both cognitive and motor tasks is discussed. Implications for the application of the research findings to the classroom for the severely handicapped individual are presented.

Positive behavior support (PBS) has been a dynamic and growing enterprise for more than 25 years. During this period, PBS has expanded applications across a wide range of populations and multiple levels of implementation. As a result, there have been understandable inconsistencies and confusion regarding the definition of PBS. In this essay, we offer an updated and unified definition. We provide a brief historical perspective and describe a process for developing a proposed definition. We also discuss the rationale for key elements of the definition.

Positive behavior support (PBS) has been a dynamic and growing enterprise for more than 25 years. During this period, PBS has expanded applications across a wide range of populations and multiple levels of implementation. As a result, there have been understandable inconsistencies and confusion regarding the definition of PBS. In this essay, we offer an updated and unified definition. We provide a brief historical perspective and describe a process for developing a proposed definition. We also discuss the rationale for key elements of the definition.

Objective: This article discusses how self-determination is central to positive behavior support, provides recommendations on how to promote it, and identifies future areas of research. Background: The value of incorporating self-determination strategies in positive behavior support plans is receiving increased attention. Rather than continue to rely on an externally controlled behavior change model in which others (e.g., teachers, service providers) determine the method to use to modify the behavior of a service recipient (student, client), self-determination shifts the responsibility over to that person; that is, he or she is integrally involved in selecting an appropriate strategy, executing it and monitoring how well he or she is doing. Conclusion: The inclusion of self-determination strategies in positive behavior support warrants further attention as individuals who have challenging behavior may be in an optimal position to manipulate their own behavior change.

Positive behavior support (PBS) has been a dynamic and growing enterprise for more than 25 years. During this period, PBS has expanded applications across a wide range of populations and multiple levels of implementation. As a result, there have been understandable inconsistencies and confusion regarding the definition of PBS. In this essay, we offer an updated and unified definition. We provide a brief historical perspective and describe a process for developing a proposed definition. We also discuss the rationale for key elements of the definition.

Aligned with the Association for Positive Behavior Support's Standards of Practice, this graduate-level text is an authorative PBS primer for professionals preparing for work in educational and community-based settings. More than 60 leading scholars present the critical skills and knowledge professinals need to translate the principles and science of PBS into person-centred interventions that improve lives. Covering a broad range of ages, disabilities, and settings, this comprehensive textbook fully prepares professionals to support all people with challenging behaviour, effectively and respectfully. Prepare professionals to: - Use the foundations of PBS and applied behaviour analysis (ABA) in everyday practice - Conduct person-centred functional behaviour assessments - Select and design effective behaviour interventions and curricular modifications - Develop comprehensive, multielement PBS plans tailored to individal needs and goals - Ensure fidelity of behaviour-plan implementation - Facilitate generalisation and maintenance of behaviour changes. Practical Materials: Vignettes that illustrate effective approaches; online companion materials for instructors, including PowerPoints that enhance teaching and learning and study questions for discussion and reflection. Topics Covered: antecedent strategies - consequence strategies - functional behaviour assessments - person-centred planning teams - data-based decision making - single-subject research methodology - systematic instruction - self-determination - quality of life - visual supports - partnering with families - curricular modifications - self-management strategies - behaviour assessment and data analysis - systemic change - culturally r4esponsive PBS - future directions for PBS - and more!

An interview was conducted with each of four mothers to gain an understanding of their perceptions of the educational and behavioral history of their children leading up to placement in a residential facility that used aversive interventions, including contingent electric skin shock. Semistructured instruments were used to understand each family's “story.” These mothers, each of whom indicated wanting to remove their child from the facility, reported about their experiences prior to placement in the facility and their experiences while their child was in residence at the facility. In general, these mothers felt there was little support for their child or themselves throughout the years prior to the placement; they had minimal participation or say in their child's programs, and they had no real choice in their child's ultimate placement in the facility that used aversive interventions. Mothers also reported experiencing little choice (along with significant coercion) regarding their child's program at this facility. As a result of this preliminary work, recommendations for future research and practice are discussed.

Included in this issue of Research and Practice for Persons With Severe Disabilities is the second in a series of “classic” TASH articles that continue to exemplify the mission of TASH, have influenced the work of TASH members, and are considered seminal to the field. In the last issue (2004, Vol. 29, Issue 1) we turned our attention to the 1977 article by Lou Brown, Barbara Wilcox, Edward Sontag, Betty Vincent, Nancy Dodd, and Lee Gruenewald entitled Toward the Realization of the Least Restrictive Environments for Severely Handicapped Students. Included with a reprint of the original article was a thoughtful commentary by Mary Falvey in which she discussed both her initial reaction to the article that was published while she was a doctoral student and her perceptions of the impact of that article on the education of students with severe disabilities in least restrictive environments. The second in this series of classic articles is Luanna Voeltz (Meyer) and Ian Evans’s Educational Validity: Procedures to Evaluate Outcomes in Programs for Severely Handicapped Learners, originally published in JASH in 1983. In the article, Voeltz and Evans underscored the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of our educational interventions for students with severe disabilities, while challenging us to consider the ways in which we were accomplishing this. When the article was written, many practitioners were collecting simple skill acquisition or behavior reduction data to determine student progress. Voeltz and Evans suggested that this was too narrow of a focus and did not represent the breadth of change about which we should be interested. They emphasized the need not only to evaluate student achievement of individual objectives, but also to determine whether (a) the change really occurred as a result of the intervention; (b) the intervention was implemented as planned; and (c) the change in behavior resulted in a meaningful outcome for the student and others. What made the article timely when it appeared was that educational program planners had just recently shifted from using sequences of normal development as a guide to identifying skills to target for instruction, to using ecological assessments to identify critical functional skills necessary in present and future adult integrated community environments. As Voeltz and Evans pointed out, as a result of this shift, we were no longer able to use developmental assessments as a method of measuring student progress. They reminded us of the need to ensure that the other methods of measuring student progress, including those based on singlesubject research design, were valid. The timing of the reprinting of the article in this issue is especially interesting, considering the present emphasis on standardsbased evaluation of educational programs for all students and the development of statewide tests to determine students’ progress. For students with severe disabilities, most states have designed alternate assessment models based on evaluation of samples of students’ work organized into portfolios. Included in many portfolios are data sheets and graphs presented as primary evidence of student work. Consequently, it would seem important to revisit and review the educational validity of the methods being used to evaluate student performance within the context of alternate statewide assessment. We hope that readers will review this article by Voeltz and Evans and the commentary by Felix Billingsley and will consider the article’s continued importance in fulfilling TASH’s mission of full inclusion of persons with disabilities.

Positive Behavior Supports (PBS) experts were surveyed to examine their perceptions of the treatment acceptability of commonly used decelerative consequence-based behavioral procedures. Findings illuminate the paradigm shifts that have occurred over the course of the careers of PBS experts and the factors that have contributed to these personal paradigm shifts. Many of the decelerative consequence-based procedures once used by respondents are no longer perceived by them to be acceptable. A small percentage of experts indicated that they still might use the full range of decelerative techniques under certain circumstances. The need for more training and ideological change were perceived to be the greatest challenges currently facing the field. Experts also indicated that involvement in PBS has broadened their understanding of applied behavior analysis, the function of behavior, antecedents, quality of life, and self-determination issues facing people with disabilities. The implications of the findings for current and future PBS researchers and practitioners are discussed.

Acquiring the skills and behaviors associated with self-determination is an important priority for young children with and without disabilities because these skills provide a foundation across the child's life span. These skills play an essential part in creating a high quality of life for a child as well as consistent opportunities to interact with the world in an active, meaningful, and highly personalized way. This article discusses the importance of self-determination for young children, and provides a framework for looking at self-determination across routines in a variety of early childhood settings. This framework is based on the idea that self-determination is a dynamic and contextually based concept. A self-monitoring set of questions is presented that can assist practitioners and families in examining contextual and multiple factors that can impact self-determination across early childhood environments. The;questions are framed within three areas: (a) the child's current skills relevant to self-determination, (b) the adult's style and behavior, and (c) the immediate learning environment.