Improving student bus-riding behavior through a whole-school intervention.

The team worked with one elementary school and its bus drivers. They taught drivers to praise kids who followed posted bus rules.

A weekly school-wide lottery gave students a chance to win prizes for good bus behavior. The researchers flipped the program on and off twice to test its effect.

Bus discipline slips dropped whenever the program was running. The gains stuck even after the consultants left.

Rogers-Warren et al. (1976) ran the first weekly performance lottery in a facility for adults. Putnam et al. (2003) copied that idea and moved it onto the school bus.

Hoffmann et al. (2024) later showed the PDC-HS tool can fine-tune token delivery in classrooms. Their work builds on the 2003 lottery piece and moves it inside the building.

Jackson et al. (2025) trained 886 drivers who serve students with I/DD. They measured staff knowledge, not student behavior. The 2003 study did the opposite: it tracked student behavior in a mixed group. The papers answer different questions, so they don’t clash.

You can cut bus referrals fast. Train drivers to catch rule-following with labeled praise. Add a simple weekly lottery to keep the buzz alive. The package costs little and keeps working after you step away.