Students with disabilities present many challenges for teachers and their families: health, orthopedic, communication, vision, and more. The biggest challenge for teachers and para-educators of student’s with disabilities are problem behaviors. As the number of children with some form of a disability increase, so does the number of children who have the potential to engage in some form of problem behaviors. According to National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), many surveys indicate that behavioral disorders vary among children, ranging from 2 to 6 percent among K-12 students. This percentage translates into 1.3 to 3.8 million cases of behavioral disorders among the school and pre-college population of students. What this means for teachers is that there are 1.3 to 3.8 million students engaging in some form of problem behaviors. Problem behaviors interfere with teaching and learning, often pose safety issues, disrupts the classroom, disrupts the home and make it very difficult for teachers and para-educators to do their jobs.

There have been a number of studies over the years addressing problem behaviors in students with severe and intellectual disabilities. Although outcomes varied from somewhat successful to not successful at all, what was apparently clear in each study was that there is a tendency for children with severe disabilities to have problem behaviors. According to one study, the more serious the disability, the higher the prevalence of challenging behavior. It is for this reason that a true understanding of challenging behaviors is imperative to the success in dealing with them.

A lot of people who work with and take care of student’s with disabilities often link a lot of their negative/challenging behaviors to their disabilities. Books, research, doctors, behavior therapists, psychologists, etc., have come to link a lot of these challenging behaviors to labels such as processing disorders, sensory disorders, and more. They come up with elaborate behavior plans, and often times, they are to no avail. The behavior might decrease or even disappear for a short period of time, but in the end, inevitably comes back. Why is that?

For my Masters Degree in Education, I had to develop, implement, score and write on an educational research project of my own design. My focus was on behaviors, specifically, teacher, para-educator and parent attributions towards challenging behaviors. The purpose of the research study was to determine if there is a direct link between teacher/para-educator/parent attributions towards problem behaviors, how it relates to the child’s disability, and how that affects their selection and implementation of interventions. For example, if a teacher attribute the cause of a behavior to the child’s disability, does interventions look differently then if that child’s challenging behavior was attributed to simply a behavior.

The end result of my study showed that the majority of survey responders attribute challenging behaviors to the disability in some form or fashion. I believe, there in lies the problem. When and where did it become written that disabilities cause challenging behaviors? Yes, Downs Syndrome babies tend to be stubborn and Autistic children have trouble with transitions, but those, in and of themselves, are not challenging behaviors! To begin to understand challenging behaviors, we must first begin to understand our own attitudes and attributions towards them.