The development of instructional control over classroom activities of deviant preschool children.

Three defiant preschoolers in a special-ed classroom kept saying "no" and walking away from teacher requests. The researchers paired a simple token board with snack or play time. Kids earned a token for each quick compliance and lost a minute of fun for refusal.

Sessions lasted 15 minutes. Teachers gave five common preschool instructions like "sit at table" or "put toys away." The team counted how many requests were followed within 5 seconds.

Compliance jumped from about a large share to over a large share for every child within five days. The kids also started trying new tasks they used to avoid. Problem behavior like yelling or throwing dropped to near zero.

When tokens were removed briefly, compliance fell, then bounced back as soon as the system returned. Parents later used the same board at home with similar results.

Staddon (1972) and McReynolds (1969) showed timeout alone can cut misbehavior, but those studies had only two kids and no reward piece. M et al. added tokens and got faster, bigger gains, showing the combo beats timeout solo.

Neef et al. (1986) later used the same token-plus-timeout logic to teach kids with ID how to use forks and napkins at lunch. Their study extends this package from classroom compliance to daily living skills.

Slocum et al. (2025) ran a larger RCT and found that positive reinforcement without escape extinction works fastest for escape-maintained behavior. Their finding supports M et al.'s choice to reinforce first, punish second.

If you work with defiant preschoolers, a token board and a one-minute chair timeout can give you near-perfect compliance in under a week. Start with dense token delivery (one per follow-through), then thin once kids hit a large share for two days. The same board travels to home, so parents can keep the gains alive.