The BASE web application will take advantage of the important results achieved by two funded European projects: the WHAAM and the PBS project
The BASE software will expand the functionalities included in the WHAAM application according to the theoretical and methodological constraints defined by the PBS project.
While the original WHAAM application was focused only on the functional assessment applied to problem behaviors of children with ADHD, the new BASE web application will include features useful for a larger field of intervention.
The BASE application will include functionalities that can be grouped in the following categories:
- tools to perform the functional assessment of problem behaviors;
- tools to evaluate the well-being status of teachers and students (i.e. rating, emotional thermometer, or visual analog scales);
- tools to collect information about academic progresses such as discipline referrals, attendance reports, etc.;
- tool to let the teachers to easily build measures to assess for instance the students engagements or comprehension;
- tools to easily generate reports about the data collected with the application.
The data collected with the BASE application will be used to take informed decisions about the strategies to increase the well-being of the school, preventing and reducing the occurrence of problem behaviors, teachers' burnout, students' drop out, and property destruction.
More in details, the BASE application will include a variety of data sources, including
- quantitative measures: these data will be automatically analyzed by the system (for instance frequencies/duration of the students' problem behaviors) in order to facilitate teachers and parents to read the reports and to plan function-based intervention plans;
- qualitative measures: these data will come from teachers and students self-reports about themselves, or observation provided from teachers about the students behavior.
The contribution of the University of Palermo will be crucial for the choice or the development of tools that will be strong from a psychometric point of view and both easy and fast to be administered and analyzed.
The main targets of the application are school leaders and teachers. School leaders will have a powerful tool to perform a continues and universal screening and monitoring of the ongoing educational processes. Teachers will take advantage of the possibility to access evidence-based features that help them to evaluate the efficacy of their training actions on multiple levels (students' performance, reduction of problem behaviours, levels of the classroom wellbeing, etc.), to share the educational events with other colleagues and with students' caregivers promoting a better communication and connection between school and families. Moreover, also students and caregivers could consult and participate in the collection of some data in other contexts than school.
The source code of the BASE application will be released with an open source license and published on Github.
Data gathered with the application will be released anonymously on the BASE repository as open data in order to encourage researchers and, more in general, school staff to learn from a large dataset of "real" information and to contribute to the advancement in this field with new data and life stories.