Archive for the 'Behavior Management' Category

Corporal punishment

Published
by
JohnL
on 1 October 2006
in Administration, Behavior Management and News
. 3 Comments

Writing from Everman (TX, US) Rick Lyman reported about the use of corporal punishment in schools. Mr. Lyman, who is a reporter for the New York Times (NY, US), described places where the practice of paddling students continues.

In a handful of districts, like the one here in Everman, there have been recent moves to reinstate it, some successful, more not. In Delaware, a bill to rescind that state?s ban on paddling never got through the legislature. But in Pike County, Ohio, corporal punishment was reinstated last year. And in southeast Mississippi, the Laurel school board voted in August to reinstate a corporal punishment policy, passing one that bars men from paddling women, but does not require parental consent, as many other policies do.

The most recent federal statistics show that during the 2002-3 school year, more than 300,000 American schoolchildren were disciplined with corporal punishment, usually one or more blows with a thick wooden paddle. Sometimes holes were cut in the paddle to make the beating more painful. Of those students, 70 percent were in five Southern states: Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas.

Mr. Lyman describes different viewpoints on the use of corporal punishment, including the opinions by evangelicals advocating it and the evidence offered by others (e.g., the American Academy of Pediatrics) against it. Based almost certainly on anecdotal evidence, some believe “it works,” meaning students no longer misbehave, I guess.

Whether corporal punishment deters misbehavior would an easy question to examine. In studying it, I’d also like to examine the other punitive methods of behavior management. And, quite importantly, I’d like to know what sorts of positive behavior management strategies are employed. In 1993-94, Jim Kauffman and a group of colleagues drafted a document addressing violence among children and how educators might address it; one of the recommendations was to eschew violence as a means of discipline. I’m still in agreement with that view.

Link to Mr. Lyman’s story (free subscription required). Link to the AAP policy statement on “Corporal Punishment in the schools.” Link to the violence statement by Porfessor Kauffman and others.

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WWC’s new reports

Published
by
JohnL
on 15 September 2006
in Behavior Management, News and Research
. 0 Comments

The US What Works Clearinghouse announced the release of seven new reports examining the benefits of various interventions. The reports cover methods related to character education, English language learning, and elementary school math. Here’s a clip from an announcement:

  • Character Education: Character education looks at how families, schools, and related social institutions support the positive character development of children and adults. This review focuses on programs designed for use in elementary, middle, or high schools with attention to student outcomes related to positive character development, prosocial behavior, and academic performance. More information about the Character Education topic is available at http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=12&ReturnPage=default.asp.
  • English Language Learning: English language learners are among the most academically at-risk groups in our schools today, and their numbers will rise steadily in the near future. This review focuses on interventions designed to improve the English language literacy or academic achievement of elementary school students who are English language learners. More information about the English Language Learning topic is available at http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=10&ReturnPage=default.asp.

  • Elementary School Math: Curriculum-based interventions outline the fundamentals of mathematics that students should know and be able to do, instructional programs and materials that organize the mathematical content, and assessments. This review focuses on curriculum-based math interventions that specify clear learning goals for students and assess student outcomes related to mathematics achievement. More information about the Elementary School Math topic is available at http://www.whatworks.ed.gov/Topic.asp?tid=04&ReturnPage=default.asp.

For previous Teach Effectively coverage of the W-W-C, look here.

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Restraints and TO

Published
by
JohnL
on 13 July 2006
in Administration, Behavior Management, News and Social behavior
. 0 Comments

Kansas (US) State Board of Education met to hear proposed guidelines for the use of restraints that might be needed for students who are out of control, according to a story by Gena Terlizzi Lawrence Journal-World.

Advocates for the disabled said the mandates are necessary to prevent mistreatment of the students.

Rocky Nichols, executive director of the Disability Rights Center, said during the 2005 legislative session he heard many parents speak about the mistreatment of their children.

“Hundreds and hundreds of parents from around the state came forward, testified and talked about how their kids were secluded and restrained inappropriately,” Nichols said. “We have kids who have been sat on by gym teachers. Their arms have been duct-taped together as a form of restraint. They’ve been rolled up in gym mats. They’ve been placed in little boxes.”

There are effective instrucational procedures to (a) create environments that reduce the probability of students behavior escalating to out-of-control status and (b) teach student appropriate ways to respond to difficult situations without losing control. One would hope that local and state education agencies (as well as teacher education institutions) prepare special and general educators (and administrators) to use those procedures. Sadly, this is too rarely the case. (See Ms. Frizzle’s illustration of a staff development session devoted to this topic reported previously here on Teach Effectively.)

Although Ms. Terlizzi’s story is about restraints, it also mentions “time out” (TO). Sadly, the discussion of TO perpetuates myths about the procedure. The term “time out” is routinely used in a generic way to refer to exclusion, especially placing a child in a physical space away from others. There is a more formal use referring to a well-studied procedure which involves, essentially, making reinforcement temporarily unavailable. I would like to encourage folks to distinguish between the informal and the formal uses, if for no other reason than that the formal use of TO very effectively reduces the frequency of targeted behavior whereas the informal use has, as far as I know, little or no scientifically documented effectiveness.

Link to Ms. Terlizzi’s story. Check the sidelinks to other coverage, too.

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Good Behavior Game

Published
by
JohnL
on 1 June 2006
in Behavior Management, Musings, Research and Social behavior
. 0 Comments

The “Good Behavior Game” (GBG) is one of the interventions endorsed by the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy about which I wrote a couple of days ago. I’m very glad that it’s included there. The GBG has an extensive history, part of which I document at the end of this post. It goes back to Mont Wolf and his colleagues in the 1960s, who employed single-subject research methods to evaluate it. Mr. Wolf, who died a couple of years ago, worked on many different interventions while at Kansas University, including the Teaching Family Model. There’s a marvelous remembrance of Mr. Wolf written by Todd Risley, available for those who want to download the PDF (the abstract is linked in the first item that follows).

The large-scale, longitudinal studies by Shep Kellams and his colleagues took the GBG to new territory. Dr. Kellams and his group found that getting teachers to use the GBG had clear and long-term benefits for their children. Dr. Kellams, who recently retired from Johns Hopkins University, is not affiliated with the Center for Integrating Educaiton and Prevention Research. It promises to publish manuals for the use of the GBG and a mastery learning method for pomoting reading competence.

It’s work by folks such as Mr. Wolf and Dr. Kellams that provide the foundations of evidence-based interventions. We owe them.

Here are notes about the GBG from the Web site of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analaysis (JABA). Each of the items in this list is linked to an abstract for the article described in the snippets. JABA has a deal with the PUBMED’s National Library of Medicine by which one can obtained PDFs of any of these articles; just go here and take the publication information from any of these articles with you.

  1. Montrose M. Wolf (1935-2004).
    Todd Risley (2005). Montrose M. Wolf (1935-2004). Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 38, 279-287. Montrose Madison Wolf, who discovered the reinforcing power of adult attention for children and based on that discovery invented and named the nonviolent parenting procedure time-out; who discovered that absent speech and social development could be artificially created with operant conditioning techniques; who first engineered a token
  2. The effects of a good behavior game on the disruptive behavior of Sudanese elementary school students.
    Saigh, P. A. & Umar, A. M. (1983). The effects of a good behavior game on the disruptive behavior of Sudanese elementary school students.Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 16, 339-344. An endemic version of the Good Behavior Game was applied in a rural Sudanese second-grade classroom. Official letters of commendation, extra time for recess, victory tags, and a winner’s chart were used as backup reinforcers. The class w
  3. Effect of the good behavior game on disruptive library behavior.
    Fishbein, J. E. & Wasik, B. H. (1981). Effect of the good behavior game on disruptive library behavior.. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 14, 89-93. A modification of the good behavior game was used to reduce disruptive behaviors during a weekly library period of children in a fourth-grade class. Modifications included student input in designing rules, attempts to state rules in positive terms, observation of class behavior in the exp
  4. The good productivity game: Increasing work performance in a rehabilitation setting.
    Lutzker, J. R. & White-Blackburn, G. (1979). The good productivity game: Increasing work performance in a rehabilitation setting.. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 12, 488. Simple reinforcement systems have been used to improve performance in a broad range of settings. For example, in classrooms, the Good Behavior Game bas been shown to be very effective (Barrish, Saunders, and Wolf, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1969, 2, 119-1
  5. Relative effectiveness of teacher attention and the good behavior game in modifying disruptive classroom behavior.
    Warner, S. P. Miller, F. D. & Cohen, M. W. (1977). Relative effectiveness of teacher attention and the good behavior game in modifying disruptive classroom behavior.Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 10, 737. A variety of behavioral procedures have been employed in recent years to modify disruptive classroom behavior. Such methods have been developed with the belief that curtailing disruptive behavior would strengthen pos
  6. Use and analysis of the good behavior game to reduce disruptive classroom behavior.
    Harris, V. W. & Sherman, J. A. (1973). Use and analysis of the good behavior game to reduce disruptive classroom behavior.. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 6, 405-417. A recent study reported procedures (the good behavior game) for reducing disruptive classroom behavior. Replication of the procedures of the good behavior game in two classrooms showed it to be an effective technique for reducing disruptive talking and out-of-sea
  7. Good-behavior game: A replication and systematic analysis.
    Medland, M. B. & Stachnik, T. J. (1972). Good-behavior game: A replication and systematic analysis.. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 5, 45-51. A good-behavior game was implemented in a fifth-grade reading class consisting of two groups of 14 students each. After the presentation of the game, reversal and component analysis phases were instituted. Game components included rules, lights (response feedback) and group consequences of
  8. Good behavior game: Effects of individual contingencies for group consequences on disruptive behavior in a classroom.
    Barrish, H. H. Saunders, M. & Wolf, M. M. (1969). Good behavior game: Effects of individual contingencies for group consequences on disruptive behavior in a classroom.Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis,. 2, 119-124. Out-of-seat and talking-out behaviors were studied in a regular fourth-grade class that included several problem children. After baseline rates of the inappropriate behaviors were obtained, the class was divided i
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