Trends in behavior analysis in education.
JABA’s education articles shifted away from academics toward social skills—time to swing back.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The authors read every education article in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis from 1968 to 1988.
They sorted each paper into two piles: academic skills (reading, math) and social-language skills (greetings, sharing).
What they found
Papers about reading, math, and writing dropped over the twenty-year span.
Papers about talking, playing, and following classroom rules rose.
How this fits with other research
Rasing et al. (1992) saw the same gap and urged teachers to run their own academic programs. Their call to action extends this 1990 warning.
Bergmann et al. (2023) later showed that newer JABA studies describe fidelity better, but they still rarely use checklists. The trend toward social-language work continued while methods slowly improved.
Ferrier et al. (2025) tracked punishment trends, not academics, yet their systematic lens shows how later audits replaced these early narrative counts.
Why it matters
If you write or fund classroom research, notice the tilt. Social and language goals now crowd out math and reading work. Rebalance by piloting a single academic intervention next term—say, peer tutoring for fractions—and publish the data. The field needs fresh academic examples to copy.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The preparation of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis Reprint Series: Behavior Analysis in Education (1988) provided an opportunity to survey and analyze trends in the field, as reflected by publications in the journal. Apparently, the large volume of behavior-analytic papers on educational topics has been declining and its contents undergoing some interesting but not uniformly welcome shifts. Although the intense concern with classroom conduct has diminished somewhat, that topic continues to be heavily emphasized. Simultaneously, reports of social skills and language studies have accelerated, but analyses of academic performance have progressively declined. Explanations for the findings remain speculative, but behavior analysts are encouraged to address these areas of essential social need.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1990 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1990.23-491