Modification of inattentive classroom behavior. Hyperactive children's use of self-recording with teacher guidance.
Teacher-timed self-recording cards quickly boost attention in hyperactive elementary students.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Three hyperactive elementary kids learned to watch their own attention.
Each time the teacher gave a quiet signal, the child marked a card.
One mark meant "I was paying attention." No mark meant "I drifted."
The whole thing took five seconds and stayed in the student’s lap.
What they found
Every child’s on-task time rose. Inattentive moments dropped.
The teacher kept teaching. The kids did the watching.
Simple self-recording worked for all three.
How this fits with other research
Billings et al. (1985) tried a cousin idea—self-instruction—with preschoolers and saw no change. The younger age and different method may explain the flop.
Lerman et al. (1995) later stretched self-management to high-schoolers with intellectual disability. They added peer scripts and saw big social gains.
Shih et al. (2011) swapped the paper card for a Wii Remote. Kids with ADHD kept limbs still to earn game time. Tech or paper, the self-watch idea holds.
Why it matters
You can start self-recording tomorrow. Pick one hyperactive student. Choose a subtle signal—hand on shoulder, chime from phone. Have the child mark yes or no. Begin with five-minute gaps, then stretch longer. No extra staff, no big cost, just a card and a pencil. If it works, add a second kid. Let the class help you refine the signal. Self-management grows fast.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three hyperactive children participated in a training program designed to teach them how to self-record their behavior in a regular classroom. Subsequently, in the regular classroom, each child was signaled when to record his behavior at intervals of time that were convenient for the teacher. Signaled self-recording produced reductions in inattentive and inappropriate classroom behavior, and increased on-task behavior for all of the children. By using such procedures in the actual classroom setting, it was possible to circumvent generalization difficulties that have been reported in previous studies attempting to modify classroom behavior by using training procedures in a laboratory setting.
Behavior modification, 1984 · doi:10.1177/01454455840083006