Introducing evidence-based practices to manage problem behaviours at school: The behave application

In the last years, an increasing awareness amongst educator and scholastic psychologists of the relevance to manage behavioural and emotional problems applying evidence-based approaches, and quasi-experimental designs is emerging. This request, however, must come to terms with certain barriers that persist in the school environment. The introduction of quantified methods to assess and monitor student's results, to evaluate the efficacy of the intervention, to understand the evolution of the single, is not part of the usual teacher's curriculum. The present paper describes the BEHAVE (Behavioral management model across Europe) application, a tool able to support the transition of all educators toward a larger adoption of quantified methods, and, specifically, the Single Case Experimental Design (SCED), within the daily activities at school. The adoption of a SCED approach, when properly settled and executed, can make clear the relevance of the internal validity of the causal relationship between intervention and outcomes, and of the external validity for generalizing the results to other people and settings (Lobo et al., 2017). The paper provides an overview of the existing commercial and open source technological solutions to collect data and monitor progresses during behavioral intervention. Moreover, the paper also provides reflections on the importance of teachers being carefully trained at a fair use of these technologies to gather and interpret data correctly. The challenges, the opportunities, and the limitations of the application of evidence-based practices at school for educational systems, policy makers, and stakeholders are finally discussed.