Katrina Anderson and Dr. Michelle Marchant, Counseling Phychology and Special Education
Main Text
There is a much needed improvement in American school childrens’ behavior skills. Evidence of this concern comes from the increase in disciplinary referrals, suspensions, and expulsions (Sugai, G., Horner, R., Dunlap, G., Hieneman, M., Lewis, T., Nelson, C., et al 2000). With more effort and time directed at implementing these disciplinary actions, teachers are required to spend less time fulfilling their lesson plans. However, by including social skills in the normal curriculum, teachers would be able to use a universal preventive measure of educating, thus lowering the need for disciplinary intervention later. The research supports this offensive measure or “front-loaded” approach; indicating that it is not only more successful, but it also increases social skills (Lane, Gresham, & O’Shaughnessy, 2002;). Unfortunately, teachers are reluctant to spend the extra time teaching social skills due to increased accountability and time directed toward students’ achievement. Therefore, Book in a Bag (BIB) was designed to help teach social skills by embedding the social skills within the curriculum, instead of adding to the curriculum. Although this solves the time issue of teaching an extra subject, it does not ensure that the students will apply their learned social skills to all environments; therefore, generalization has proven to be difficult. Magg (2006) suggests two ways of encouraging generalization. The first step is to select socially valid behaviors for all students through a systematic measure. Secondly, the social skills need to include peer groups and promote entrapment within the classroom’s social structure. The BIB research team has incorporated these two methods for enhancing generalization and plan on investigating the impact of the BIB curriculum on students’ generalization of social skills in the classroom.
It is hypothesized that integration of a social skills curriculum with other general curricula (e.g., literacy and social studies) will allow students the opportunity to learn, practice, and use social skills. This is likely because of the students’ exposure to multiple examples of the social skill within the framework of various curricula and activities. It seems even more likely to produce generalization if and when the activities require students to learn, practice, and use the skill collaboratively. Integration and collaborative activities are both examples of what Stokes and Baer (1977) identify as natural maintaining contingencies that promote generalization of skills.
Most educators lack training in strategies, such as those discussed previously, that promote the emotional and behavioral skills of children and youth. The most widely used methods of discipline are punitive, such as depriving students of privileges, mobility (in the form of isolation or detention), or the company of friends; in-school suspension; and overcorrection (Cameron, 2006;). Evidence suggests that reactive and punitive practices are not effective (Skiba & Peterson, 2000;). In fact, they inadvertently reinforce antisocial behavior. Unfortunately, punitive discipline tends to predominate in proportion to the alternative (Skiba & Peterson, 2000), which is to take a positive, preventive approach to discipline. This leads one to realize the pertinence of infusing positive behavior support strategies into the schools. Involving educators in evidence-based methods proven to develop students’ social skills should accomplish this.
The Lakeview BIB Study will study the implementation of Lakeview Elementary School facultycreated BIBs. Included in this study is a closer look at student use of social skills prior to implementation of a specific skill, during the month of instruction on that skill, and two months after the instruction has been delivered. We completed this research during this past school year.
Starting in January 2010, teachers at Lakeview started collecting data on targeted students in their classrooms. Instruction on the specific social skill began in February. Teachers again collected data on the same target students. Interobserver agreement data were collected by myself and research assistants across all teachers participating in the study. The data from the teachers and the observers were compared to ensure reliability. The research team also gave teachers an implementation log that was used to measure the teachers’ use of the BIB lesson plans. This log gave the researchers good data on how useful and popular certain aspects of the lessons were. Finally, teachers finished collecting followup data at the end of March. All of these data were analyzed during the summer and fall of 2010. The preliminary results of the study are very positive. There seems to have been an increase of overall social skill use in the targeted students.
Lakeview Elementary has been a partnership school to BYU since Lakeview was founded a few years ago. The relationship between these two school continues to improve. This partnership will continue to be maintained through these next years. Lakeview is appreciative of the success of the BIB program. They are interested in the results and want to continue to work on improving the use of social skills by students at that school. Currently, the research assistants are working on qualitative data analysis collected at the same time as the quantitative data discussed above. This will give a good idea of what was important to teachers, administration, and parents. The team will make all of this information accessible for referencing in future publications. The team also hopes to use the data to publish a report about praise statements in conjunction with social skill use. Overall, these data collected in many formats helped the research team better understand how to implement BIB and see the benefits of this social skills program.
References
- Cameron, M. (2006). Managing school discipline and implications for social workers: A review of the literature. Children and Schools, 28(4), 219-227.
- Lane, K. L., Gresham, F. M., & O’Shaughnessy, T. E. (2002). Serving students with or at risk for emotional and behavior disorders: Future challenges. Education and Treatment of Children, 25(4), 507-521.
- Maag, J. W. (2006). Social skills training for students with emotional and behavioral disorders: A review of reviews. Behavioral Disorders, 32(1), 5-17.
- Skiba, R. J., & Peterson, R. L. (2000). School discipline at a crossroads: From zero tolerance to early response [Electronic version]. Exceptional Children, 66, 335-347. Retrieved August 1, 2005, from ProQuest database.
- Stokes, Trevor F., Baer, Donald M. (1977). An implicit technology of generalization. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 10 (2), 349.
- Sugai, G., Horner, R., Dunlap, G., Hieneman, M., Lewis, T., Nelson, C., et al. (2000). Applying positive behavior support and functional behavioral assessment in schools. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 2(3), 131-143.