The Motivation Assessment Scale
About the Motivation Assessment Scale
The Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS) is designed to help with a language impaired person’s problem behaviors. An understanding of a person’s motivations becomes a guide for interventions, such as restructuring the environment or teaching that person skills for fulfilling personal needs in a more effective and productive way. The emphasis is on understanding, respect, and helping a person successfully negotiate their environment.
Benefits of using the MAS:
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Allows you to respond effectively to behavior
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Quickly assesses motivation, i.e., the function of a problem behavior
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Improves positive behavioral interventions
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The MAS is research-based, tested, and validated
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Can easily be administered in educational and institutional settings
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Has been used by psychologists and teachers since 1988
Why Motivation Assessment Scale Software?
For best results, the authors recommend administering several scales (to multiple raters and/or in multiple settings) to evaluate a single problem behavior. Software versions of the MAS provide quick professional assistance in combining and analyzing scale results, assistance in creating reports, a convenient way to store data, and other features.
Copyright notice
The Motivation Assessment Scale and The Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS) Administration Guide copyright © 1992 by Monaco & Associates Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of these works in any form, including digital and electronic transmission, is a violation of United States copyright law and international agreements and is prohibited. If you wish to excerpt any portion of the material for your publication, contact us here.
The Functional Approach
"Despite all of our best efforts, a large number of people who have severe disabilities continue to display serious and disruptive behavior problems... All of us would prefer to use only positive treatments for these behavior problems... [M]ost people involved in this field today recommend that a functional analysis be carried out before any treatment. The idea behind the functional analysis is to see why the person is misbehaving... A teacher might give a student difficult class work for 5 minutes, easy work for 5 minutes, then difficult work for 5 minutes to see if the student was more disruptive during different types of tasks. Similarly, parents or evening staff could alternate nights of giving or withholding nighttime snacks to see if these treats are having an effect on problems around bedtime..."
Practical Problems
"Several problems come up when trying to discover why someone is misbehaving using a functional analysis... For example, as we just described, a teacher could change the difficulty of tasks to see if this changes a student’s behavior problem. But what if the student then hits another student when he is upset? What if he hurts himself? Is the information from such an assessment worth the risk of injury?
"Another problem...is knowing where to look... Unfortunately, in the past, little help has been available to assist in selecting among the infinite number of things that might be causing certain behavior problems."
The MAS
"We have developed the Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS) as an additional way to find out why people’s problem behaviors persist by assessing the influence of social attention, tangibles, escape, and sensory consequences on problem behavior. The MAS is a sixteen item questionnaire that assesses the functions or motivations of behavior problems. The sixteen items are organized into four categories of reinforcement (attention, tangible, escape, and sensory) described in the previous section. The MAS asks questions about the likelihood of a behavior problem occurring in a variety of situations (e.g., when presented with difficult tasks).
"In addition, using this scale does not involve making behavior problems worse, a feature that has obvious advantages. It is hoped that through the use of the MAS, people with severe behavior problems will have greater access to positive interventions."
Research on the MAS
"One question that is often asked when discussing the Motivation Assessment Scale has to do with its necessity. Would simply asking teachers, parents, or others if an individual’s problem behavior was maintained by attention, escape, tangibles, or sensory consequences yield the same information as a full administration of the scale? In order to answer this question, we asked the teachers in a previous study to rank the four classes of maintaining variables for their possible influence on the individuals’ self-injurious behaviors (Durand & Crimmins, 1988). We observed that these rankings did not correlate significantly with the teachers’ MAS scores. Therefore, although teachers could predict an individual’s self-injurious behavior through their answers on the Motivation Assessment Scale, their global ratings of controlling variables were not as accurate. Guessing why individuals may misbehave may be helpful in order to generate hypotheses, but it is always important to follow up your guesses with more formal assessments."
From the MAS Administration Guide: Why do we need the MAS?
Who typically uses MAS software products?
Psychologists, teachers, school psychologists, and others who respond to problem behavior.
What is the cost of MASSoftware?
How does MASSoftware provide security and confidentiality?
MASSoftware Professional is password protected. Your local MASSoftware Professional administrator can set up user accounts so that users may see only scales that are assigned to them. Raters who log in to MASSoftare Professional on a rater account will have access only to uncompleted scales assigned to them. MASSoftware Professional supports the use of identifying codes when communicating about a consumer.
iMAS is password protected. A site with multiple users may have an administrative level, allowing access to all scales completed at that site, and an individual user level which allows access only to scales completed by the individual user.
What are the technical specifications?
MASSoftware Professional is a Windows applications, and will run on any Windows PC. Initial installation of MASSoftware Professional requires less than 50MB of disc space.
iMAS is hosted by Monaco & Associates and does not require any installation. It will run on any standard internet browser. It has been extensively tested on Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Is technical support provided?
Technical support for MASSoftware products is available free of charge. Bug fixes of our current generation of software, should any be discovered, receive our immediate attention and are provided free of charge.
Can I get user training?
MASSoftware products generally require little or no training. The software comes with an online Help file, which provides help in both using the software and interpreting the results. Users needing further help may call or email our technical support staff.
Unauthorized duplication of the MAS
The Motivation Assessment Scale is a copyrighted work and is, therefore, protected by United States law and international agreements. Unauthorized duplication of the Motivation Assessment Scale is strictly prohibited and punishable by fine and/or imprisonment.
Unauthorized duplication includes, but is not limited to, making facsimile copies of the printed scale or using MASSoftware products to print copies of the scale in excess of those needed to allow raters to complete scales.
Can I try out the software?
You may order a free 7-day trial of iMAS or 14-day trial MASSoftware Professional here.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Functional Approach
"Despite all of our best efforts, a large number of people who have severe disabilities continue to display serious and disruptive behavior problems... All of us would prefer to use only positive treatments for these behavior problems... [M]ost people involved in this field today recommend that a functional analysis be carried out before any treatment. The idea behind the functional analysis is to see why the person is misbehaving... A teacher might give a student difficult class work for 5 minutes, easy work for 5 minutes, then difficult work for 5 minutes to see if the student was more disruptive during different types of tasks. Similarly, parents or evening staff could alternate nights of giving or withholding nighttime snacks to see if these treats are having an effect on problems around bedtime..."
Practical Problems
"Several problems come up when trying to discover why someone is misbehaving using a functional analysis... For example, as we just described, a teacher could change the difficulty of tasks to see if this changes a student’s behavior problem. But what if the student then hits another student when he is upset? What if he hurts himself? Is the information from such an assessment worth the risk of injury?
"Another problem...is knowing where to look... Unfortunately, in the past, little help has been available to assist in selecting among the infinite number of things that might be causing certain behavior problems."
The MAS
"We have developed the Motivation Assessment Scale (MAS) as an additional way to find out why people’s problem behaviors persist by assessing the influence of social attention, tangibles, escape, and sensory consequences on problem behavior. The MAS is a sixteen item questionnaire that assesses the functions or motivations of behavior problems. The sixteen items are organized into four categories of reinforcement (attention, tangible, escape, and sensory) described in the previous section. The MAS asks questions about the likelihood of a behavior problem occurring in a variety of situations (e.g., when presented with difficult tasks).
"In addition, using this scale does not involve making behavior problems worse, a feature that has obvious advantages. It is hoped that through the use of the MAS, people with severe behavior problems will have greater access to positive interventions."
Research on the MAS
"One question that is often asked when discussing the Motivation Assessment Scale has to do with its necessity. Would simply asking teachers, parents, or others if an individual’s problem behavior was maintained by attention, escape, tangibles, or sensory consequences yield the same information as a full administration of the scale? In order to answer this question, we asked the teachers in a previous study to rank the four classes of maintaining variables for their possible influence on the individuals’ self-injurious behaviors (Durand & Crimmins, 1988). We observed that these rankings did not correlate significantly with the teachers’ MAS scores. Therefore, although teachers could predict an individual’s self-injurious behavior through their answers on the Motivation Assessment Scale, their global ratings of controlling variables were not as accurate. Guessing why individuals may misbehave may be helpful in order to generate hypotheses, but it is always important to follow up your guesses with more formal assessments."
About the Authors