Effects of Rules and Feedback on Classroom Behavior of Adolescents in a Residential Treatment Setting.
Rules on the wall plus public marks and a quick end-of-class chat drove teen classroom disruption under 10 percent without any tokens.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Barathi and team worked with three classrooms of teens in a residential treatment school.
Each room got the same package: three rules posted on the wall, a scoreboard where the teacher added green or red marks every five minutes, and a two-minute talk at the end of class about how the group did.
No tokens, candy, or points were given. The researchers used a multiple-baseline design so the package started in one room while the others stayed on baseline.
What they found
Problem behavior fell below 10 percent of observed intervals in every room once the package began.
Teachers said the plan was easy and fair. The drops happened fast—within the first week—and stayed low for the rest of the study.
How this fits with other research
Lydersen et al. (1974) and Petursdottir et al. (2019) got similar big drops in disruption, but they paid kids with tokens. Barathi shows you can skip the coins and still win.
Joslyn et al. (2020) also worked with teens in a restrictive school and used a group system—the Good Behavior Game. Both studies cut disruption even when teachers didn’t run the steps perfectly, so the teen population seems to respond well to clear public feedback.
Zimmerman et al. (1962) is the grandparent here: rules plus teacher praise worked in 1962; Barathi keeps the rules and swaps praise for public visual feedback—an update for today’s screen-wise kids.
Why it matters
You can run this tomorrow. Post three rules, bring a whiteboard, and mark green or red every five minutes. End class with a quick “We got 83 percent greens—what can we tweak?” No store, no tokens, no prep time. If you work with adolescents who chafe at point systems, this gives you a low-cost, low-risk first step that still cuts problem behavior below 10 percent.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Over the past 30 years, researchers have shown that various types of group contingency procedures can decrease problem behavior displayed by young children in academic settings. Recently, researchers have demonstrated that presession rules, within-session feedback, and interdependent group contingencies (i.e., contingently delivered tangible and edible items) increased appropriate behavior displayed by detained adolescents in a residential treatment facility. Nevertheless, it is possible that rules with feedback about rule violations could produce comparable outcomes. To address this question, we used a nonconcurrent multiple baseline design across classrooms to evaluate the extent to which rules, visual feedback (i.e., marks on a board denoting rule violations), and postsession feedback decreased problem behaviors in three classrooms within a residential detention facility. Results indicate that problem behavior decreased to less than 10% of observation intervals in each classroom. Results from a social validity measure indicate that the procedures and outcomes were acceptable to the respective classroom teachers.
Behavior modification, 2020 · doi:10.1177/0145445519834637