Severe classroom behavior problems: teachers or counsellors.
Teacher praise alone outperformed two counseling packages for cutting disruptive behavior in middle-school boys.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers compared three ways to calm disruptive middle-school boys.
One group got teacher praise only.
Another group got teacher praise plus seven hours of behavioral counseling.
The third group got teacher praise plus client-centered counseling.
Classes were picked at random so the results would be fair.
What they found
Teacher praise alone worked best.
Adding behavioral counseling helped a little.
Adding client-centered counseling did not help at all.
Simple approval from the teacher beat every counseling package.
How this fits with other research
McLaughlin et al. (1972) and Hursh et al. (1974) already showed that token points cut disruptions in elementary rooms.
Marcucella et al. (1978) now shows the same idea works with plain teacher praise in middle school.
Johnson et al. (1994) looks like a contradiction: their token economy failed for kids with ADHD plus intellectual disability.
The difference is severity: tokens help typical learners but may need extra tactics when disability is present.
Allen et al. (2001) extends the story: tokens plus medication can beat medication alone, proving teacher tools still matter in clinical groups.
Why it matters
You do not need long meetings to fix classroom chaos.
Start with immediate, specific praise for on-task behavior.
Track disruptions for one week, then add praise every two minutes while the child is quiet.
If the child has complex needs, layer tokens or medication later, but always try teacher praise first.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This experiment was designed to determine the relative effectiveness of teacher and counselling approaches in the reduction of disruptive or inappropriate classroom behavior. Inappropriate classroom behavior frequencies of 12 academically low achieving, seventh-grade, black male students, with a reported high rate of inappropriate classroom behavior, were recorded. Three groups, with nearly equal mean inappropriate behaviors, were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions: behavioral counselling, client-centered counselling, or no counselling. Each counselling group received fifteen 30-minute counselling sessions, at a rate of two to three times a week. In addition to counselling, all students subsequently received teacher approval within the classroom. Results indicated that the teacher was able to reduce inappropriate behavior more than any counselling group. There were also indications that behavioral counselling, but not client-centered counselling, was moderately helpful in reducing inappropriate classroom behavior.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1978 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1978.11-53