Abstract
In this issue we highlight strategies that teachers of students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBDs) can use to improve academic and/or behavioral performance. Strategies emphasized include differential reinforcement, systematic fraction instruction, positive greetings at the door, behavioral momentum, choice, and visual activity schedules. Our authors have done an exceptional job of detailing how and why to implement these research-based techniques in the contexts that each describe.
In the first article, Maag and Daly cleverly explain how teachers can use students’ motivation to escape work to increase their productivity and accuracy. As a backdrop, the authors outline a problem teaching situation in which educators end up reducing students’ access to instruction by removing them from the classroom for problem behavior. Maag and Daly describe how teachers can avoid this negative reinforcement trap by using the student’s desire to escape a task as a reinforcer for schoolwork completion, a strategy known as differential negative reinforcement of alternative behavior. Students essentially escape a portion of a task they perceive to be unpleasant by doing a portion of the task well. Intentional teacher effort aims to keep students engaged in classroom work and help them be more successful and productive.
In the second article, Shaw and Ellis outline how elementary grades students can be more successful and productive with fractions through application of the evidence-based instructional framework self-regulated strategy development. The authors describe how a freely accessible curriculum—SRSD Fractions—can be used to build students’ conceptual and procedural understanding of fractions. Shaw and Ennis focus on one of the three curricular skills: adding and subtracting of fractions with unlike denominators. In addition to providing detailed implementation steps, the authors advise teachers to build in effective low-intensity behavioral interventions like behavior-specific praise and choice making whenever possible to help individualize and intensify the instructional effort.
In the third article, Page and Landrum also spotlight the utility of low-intensity behavioral strategies, this time to prevent escalation of potentially negative interactions between minority students and majority teachers. The authors suggest that low-intensity strategies like positive greetings at the door, behavioral momentum, and choice show promise as techniques to defuse situations that might otherwise escalate into more problematic interactions between Black youth and White teachers. Page and Landrum summarize data showing that Black students experience disproportionate disciplinary outcomes and suggest that a contributor to the data may be cultural disconnects between adults and the student population. In describing the implementation steps in the three strategies that can be used in the beginning of student–teacher interactions, the authors assert that what could initially be relatively minor classroom conflict, disruption, or rule violations do not have to accelerate to more problematic disciplinary interactions if the low-intensity strategies are effectively employed.
In the final two articles, different author teams highlight positive uses for visual activity schedules. In the fourth article, Tuck, Chow, Kim, Malone, and Smith demonstrate how visual activity schedules can be used for language and behavioral skill development in students with EBD. In the fifth article, Milam and Sutton describe how the visual schedules can be used to improve classroom transitions. In both articles, the author teams detail types of schedules, the research supporting their use in classrooms, and implementation steps in how to plan, use, and evaluate use for the specific aims of the research-based practice.
We hope that readers gain insights in why the particular article targets can work and the skills it takes to successfully implement the strategies in classrooms that serve students with or at risk for EBD.
