There has been an increasing call for school psychologists to spend time collecting data that are functionally related to the planning of academic interventions. In order to identify the problem and plan for remediation, data must be taken that bear directly on the child's academic problems in the classroom and the curricular sequences actually utilized in instruction. Not all referred problems are a result of skill deficits. The difference between skill and performance deficits lies in the fact that skill deficits may require the acquisition of new behaviors before progress can occur, while performance deficits require changing the level of performance of already acquired skills. If assessment data are to be functionally related to interventions, objective measures should be established that may be taken repeatedly; environmental events that are related to the problem or may be manipulated to solve the problem should be analyzed. Several variables consistently appear related to academic achievement: time allotted for instruction, academic engaged time, content covered, and direct instruction. It is suggested that information regarding environmental variables should be collected through a specifically structured problem identification interview as well as through standardized classroom observations. There are many published descriptions of successful behavior interventions, some involving detailed alterations of instructional and teaching behaviors. A decision about what type of intervention to employ clearly depends on the analysis of relationships among assessment data, analysis of available resources, and degree of permissible intrusiveness in classroom structure. (LLL)