Committed teachers and administrators often look for strategies and practices to better support students struggling to negotiate the academic, social, and behavioral demands of the classroom setting. Such practices may include modifications to how they deliver instruction or manage behavior for their entire class. Other strategies may include more focused intervention efforts such as implementing self-monitoring interventions to improve academic outcomes or behavioral contracts to increase work completion. Still other interventions may be even more intensive, such as functional assessment-based interventions. Although such intensive supports can be challenging to design and implement given teachers' multiple demands throughout the school day and beyond, interventions specifically targeting the function or purpose of the student's behavior are more likely to produce behavioral change. In this article, the authors provide an overview of functional assessment-based interventions, with an emphasis on one systematic approached developed by John Umbreit and colleagues (2007). Next, they provide an overview of Project FUNCTION, a study conducted at Vanderbilt University. Project FUNCTION was developed to: (1) prepare graduate-level university students to design, implement, and evaluate functional assessment-based interventions; and (2) provide direct support to local school teachers working with students with pronounced behavioral concerns. The authors conclude with an overview of the five studies conducted as part of Project FUNCTION presented in this special issue. All studies focused on improving academic engagement, a pivotal skill necessary for learning to occur. (Contains 4 tables, 1 box, and 3 figures.)