Teachers' Contingent Responses to Children's Mands in Preschool Classrooms is the kind of topic that looks straightforward until it collides with the speed, ambiguity, and competing demands of school teams and classroom routines, busy classrooms and teacher-managed routines. In Teachers' Contingent Responses to Children's Mands in Preschool Classrooms, for this course, the practical stakes show up in feasible school-based support, stronger collaboration, and better student participation, not in abstract discussion alone.
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Join Free →The purpose of this study was to use a direct behavioral observation coding system to quantify and categorize children mands and teachers' contingent responses to these mands in three types of preschool classroom activities (child-initiated, meals, and teacher-directed small groups). The coding system used in this study was grounded in verbal behavior as characterized in the science of human behavior. Children's mands were categorized based on their presumed function and teachers' responses were based on judgments about whether the response matched the presumed function. A nominal descriptive analysis design was used to quantify the number of children's mands, categorize children's mands by their presumed functions, and classify corresponding teacher responses across activities and within each activity. Results showed that, on average across all activities, the proportion of children's mands to which teachers responded was .82 and the proportion of teacher responses that matched the presumed function of children's mands was .55. Teachers' responses matched the presumed function of mands for attention-simple most often, while teachers' responses often did not match the presumed function of mands for tangibles and escape. Teachers matched the presumed function of mands for escape more often in meals than in the other activities. Results suggest that for meals the number of children might influence if and how teachers' respond to children's mands. Implications of the study of teachers' responsivity to children's communication behavior using a verbal behavior framework are discussed.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
Sara is an Assistant Professor at James Madison University in the Inclusive Early Childhood Education program. She obtained her PhD in special education from the University of Florida. Her work focuses on using principles from the science of human behavior to research and implement effective professional development practices for early care and education professionals and functional communication development.
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252 research articles with practitioner takeaways
232 research articles with practitioner takeaways
231 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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