Child behavioral assessment and cognitive-behavioral interventions in schools

In this article, we first review the basic principles and practices of child behavioral assessment. We define child behavioral assessment as an exploratory, hypothesis-testing approach in which a variety of procedures are used to: a) understand a given child, group, or social ecology; and b) plan and implement an intervention based on that understanding. Next, we examine the effects of cognitive-behavioral interventions in the treatment of school refusal. We conclude that although broad-based cognitive-behavioral procedures are generally effective with school-refusing youngsters, they can be enhanced by a prescriptive treatment approach in which assessment information is used to tailor the treatment to the specified problem of a given school-refusing child. Different conditions that serve to motivate school refusal are used to illustrate this approach.