Contents

Summary

With the Data Standard v3.3-a release, a number of changes were introduced to the Discipline domain. New entities, like the StudentDisciplineIncidentBehaviorAssociation and StudentDisciplineIncidientNonOffenderAssociation were introduced while the previously used StudentDisciplineIncidentAssociation was deprecated. The following documentation is an attempt to clarify best practices of how to store the Discipline data given these recent changes.

Locations for the Behavior Descriptor

The Behavior descriptor captures the nature of the behavior of an individual involved in a discipline incident.  This descriptor is located in a few places within the Discipline domain. Namely:

1. as an optional collection on DisciplineIncident
2. as a required field on the new StudentDisciplineIncidentBehaviorAssociation
3. as an optional collection on the deprecated StudentDisicplineIncidentAssociation

The Alliance advises avoiding use of deprecated elements, so usage of the Behavior collection on StudentDisicplineIncidentAssociation is not recommended.

Use Cases

There are four identified use cases these elements address.

Behaviors in an Incident

In a DisciplineIncident, it is assumed that there may be multiple behaviors performed by multiple students within a single incident. For this reason, the Behavior descriptor is an optional collection on DisciplineIncident. All behaviors associated with the incident SHOULD be recorded here, regardless of which student or non-student participant was responsible for each Behavior.

Student Behaviors

The second use case is to tie these behaviors to the individuals responsible. To do this, use the StudentDisciplineIncidentBehaviorAssociation. In the new entity, Behavior is a part of the key and so must be defined. If a student is responsible for more than one behavior in a single incident, multiple StudentDisciplineIncidentBehaviorAssociation records will be created.

Note that this use case was previously handled via the StudentDisciplineIncidentAssociation, but that entity is now deprecated.

Behavior Consequences

The final use case is to tie these students and behaviors to a DisciplineAction. There is a new collection of optional references on DisciplineAction to StudentDisciplineIncidentBehaviorAssociation. This allows for multiple behaviors to be tied to a single action.

Alternatively, if there are different actions required for each behavior, multiple DisciplineAction records can be created to reference each StudentDisciplineIncidentBehaviorAssociation record.

Capture of Non-offender Data

The last new entity, StudentDisciplineIncidientNonOffenderAssociation does not include Behavior descriptor as it is assumed there is no Behavior or DisciplineAction required for students that were not the perpetrators of the incident.