Abstract
Special Series: Putting It Together–Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports in Rural Schools
Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a multitiered framework aimed at preventing problem behaviors from occurring in school and intervening when they do. As a school-wide approach to data- and team-based decision making, evidence-based prevention and intervention practices are implemented along a continuum of need and with adherence to fidelity. Over 26,000 schools across the globe have been trained to implement PBIS. These schools are located in every U.S. state and across all geographic settings, from New York City to Minot, North Dakota. Research suggests that when PBIS is implemented with fidelity, schools experience fewer disciplinary exclusions, including office disciplinary referrals and suspensions, and higher academic achievement (Lee & Gage, 2020).
Although PBIS is widely implemented and researched, few studies have focused on the experiences of schools implementing PBIS in rural settings or explicitly compared implementation and outcomes in rural and urban settings. Thus, we developed this special series for Rural Special Education Quarterly to address this gap in the literature. Specifically, we were interested in working with author teams to develop a series of studies describing PBIS implementation in rural settings. We invited leading rural implementers in PBIS to join with the researchers to help provide more context. Collectively, these studies build a data-based narrative that PBIS can be successfully implemented in rural schools and, importantly, that PBIS can and does have positive and meaningful impacts in rural contexts.
Author teams from across the United States were invited to contribute to this special series and asked to develop studies that met two important criteria. First, the study must focus on rural schools. We did not operationally define the term “rural” for the author teams but instead let the author teams define their own criteria. All author teams used a similar approach and defined rural setting based on the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, and National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) criteria, which are based on the U.S. Census definitions. The NCES locale indicator includes four categories (City, Suburb, Town, and Rural) and three subcategories for each category that are more specific. The subcategory definitions for rural schools are provided in Table 1. Often, the subcategories are collapsed so that schools are categorized into one of the four primary locales. We acknowledge that the NCES designation does not capture many of the nuances of a rural setting (see Hawley et al., 2017 for a thorough discussion). For example, the experiences of students in a rural school in Florida are likely very different from the experiences of a rural school in Alaska or Montana or Arizona. Nonetheless, these studies needed a defensible and extant variable that defined each school’s locale, and the authors all relied on the same source, increasing comparability across the studies. However, we collectively acknowledge the limitations this approach can introduce.
National Center for Educational Statistics Definition of Rural Locale.
Note. Definitions from Geverdt (2015).
The second criterion was that the study must use a large sample of schools or students. We did not operationally define the term “large sample” but emphasized that the sample should be large enough to make inferences at the state and national levels. Thus, we asked study teams to focus on quantitative analyses to describe PBIS implementation and comparisons of behavioral and school climate outcomes in rural and non-rural settings. Each of the author teams used a different quantitative approach, based on their individually defined research questions. As a result, this special series brings together studies of PBIS using large samples and advanced quantitative methods. We believe that, as a result, we have collected highly relevant and potentially influential studies of PBIS applications in rural schools across the nation.
The first study, by MacSuga-Gage, Kaplan, Batton, Ellis, and Gage, was included to describe differences between students, academic and behavioral outcomes in schools located in rural and urban settings, with a focus on students with disabilities. The authors used data from 421 schools in North Carolina, including 154 located in rural settings, across 11 consecutive years. This study was included to set the stage for the subsequent articles by describing key outcome differences by locale.
The second article, by Ellis, Gage, Kramer, Baton, and Angelosante, included 643 elementary schools in Georgia, 385 of which were in rural settings, and explored students’ perceptions of school climate in rural and urban schools and compared schools using PBIS to schools not using PBIS. This study is among the first using student-level perceptions of school climate and comparing those perceptions in schools implementing PBIS and not implementing PBIS.
Next, Grasley-Boy, Gage, Lombardo, Anderson, and Rila explored PBIS implementation fidelity in schools in rural and urban California. Using data from 4,022 schools, 929 of which were in rural settings, the authors found that schools in rural settings had higher implementation fidelity than schools in urban settings. They then compared rural and urban schools using PBIS and not using PBIS. The authors found that urban schools implementing with fidelity suspended fewer students with disabilities than rural schools.
The fourth study, by Garbacz, Santiago, and Gulbrandson, used longitudinal data from Wisconsin to explore PBIS implementation, particularly school-level predictors of implementation fidelity. The authors used data from 676 schools and found that rural schools were slower to sustain fidelity of implementation than urban schools.
The last two articles will be included in the next issue of Rural Special Education Quarterly. Chaparro, Kittleman, McDaniel, George, VanLone, and So used data from 11,561 schools located in 44 U.S. states, including 1,215 in rural settings, and examined implementation fidelity between schools in rural and non-rural settings. The authors found that rural schools had lower Tier 2 and Tier 3 fidelity of implementation than schools in urban settings. Finally, Gage, Kern, George, Elfner, and Robbie explored PBIS implementation in 1,627 schools, including 511 in rural settings, in Florida. Results suggest that there were no differences in the likelihood of implementing PBIS with fidelity in rural and urban schools. When comparing schools implementing PBIS with those not implementing it, the authors found that rural schools implementing PBIS used more out-of-school suspensions than other schools.
Putting it all together, the results of these six studies have important implications for both research and practice. The results suggest that future studies of PBIS should consider locale when conducting analyses as differences in both implementation fidelity and discipline outcomes were evident across the studies. For example, locale should always be used as a covariate in a statistical model to control for fidelity and outcome differences. For practitioners, the results suggest that implementation fidelity can vary based on locale, with some studies suggesting that rural schools may need more technical assistance support, particularly when installing Tier 2 and Tier 3 practices. Finally, and perhaps most interesting, is that the results were inconsistent across the studies, suggesting that different rural contexts may have different effects on implementation outcomes. By this, we mean that different types of rural settings, such as schools in extremely rural areas, may have unique challenges different from rural schools in other settings, such as rural Florida. Future research should disaggregate implementation fidelity and outcome difference more, defining rural features of schools beyond the NCES code.
Our goal for this special series was to expand the research exploring PBIS implementation in rural school contexts. We are excited about these studies as they are not only among the largest samples of schools included in PBIS research broadly, but certainly the largest samples of schools exploring locale differences in PBIS implementation and discipline outcomes to date. We hope that these studies are the impetus for future work and, as a result, both knowledge about implementation and outcomes in rural settings will increase and lead to improved technical assistance to implementors in rural settings. As authors, we wish to thank Drs. Courtade and Pennington for their exceptional support developing and finishing this special series. In addition, we want to send our gratitude to the author teams for leaning in and completing exciting studies that we believe will push research and practice forward.