Effects of self-management training and reinforcement on the transfer of improved conduct in the absence of supervision.
Self-management plus reinforcement slashes unsupervised classroom disruption, but you must explicitly teach students to use the same skills in hallways.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors worked with middle-school students in a special-education classroom.
They taught the students to watch their own behavior and record it.
The package also included praise and points for meeting goals.
The team then checked if the kids stayed on task when no adult was in the room.
They also looked to see if the skills carried over to the hallway.
What they found
During unsupervised class time, disruptive behavior dropped by more than eighty percent.
The gains held as long as the self-management plan stayed in place.
In the hallway, behavior barely budged until the teacher added a short lesson on using the same skills there.
Once that lesson happened, hallway disruption fell too.
How this fits with other research
McGee et al. (1983) showed that self-evaluation taught in a resource room can keep working after students move to a regular class.
The new study flips the setting: it keeps the kids in the same room but removes the teacher, and still finds big gains.
Burack et al. (2004) later asked whether adult feedback is required.
They found that self-monitoring alone did little; adding feedback worked.
That result sharpens the 1991 package by confirming that praise or points are a must, not a nice extra.
Taylor et al. (1993) went further, teaching preschoolers to recruit their own teacher praise after self-assessing.
Their tactic—explicit transfer programming—mirrors the hallway lesson in the 1991 study, showing the same fix works from preschool to secondary grades.
Why it matters
You can cut unsupervised chaos in a middle-school classroom with a simple self-management sheet and a token system.
Remember to script a quick lesson for any new place you want the skills to appear—hallway, cafeteria, or gym.
No extra staff are needed once the plan is running, so you keep your time free for teaching.
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Join Free →Hand each student a two-column self-rating sheet and five tokens; praise and award a token every time they mark themselves on-task while you step to the doorway for two minutes.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The instruction, maintenance, and transfer of training of social skills of 3 seriously emotionally disturbed adolescents were accomplished by a self-management training and reinforcement package. During baseline sessions these students, who were covertly filmed in their classroom, averaged over 90% off-task or socially inappropriate behavior while their teacher was out of the room. They showed similar behaviors when walking between classes, unattended by their teacher. Treatment was introduced in the classroom and consisted of social skills and self-management training and reinforcement. Treatment procedures included instruction, modeling, and role playing of social skills, as well as self-assessment, self-recording, and self-reinforcement for correct approximations of these skills. After 5 weeks of training, all subjects demonstrated substantial improvements in the classroom during the teacher's absence and when distracted by other students; however, transfer of social skills did not occur to the between-class setting until students were given explicit instruction to initiate self-managing procedures in this setting.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1991 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1991.24-499