CONTROLLING STUDENT'S BEHAVIOR Controlling student's behavior



Controlling student's behavior

Introduction

Early adolescence is a particularly important period of development because it is a time when diverse problems begin to emerge and because problems appearing in this stage often have more negative long-term consequences than do problems that develop later. Early adolescence is a time when emotional states become less positive and more variable, peer associations and friendships change, frequent peer harassment and relational aggression occur, and adult supervision decreases. It is a time when peers become more salient and their influence increases. For some adolescents, affiliation with deviant peer's increases and the use of tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs accelerates.

The organization and structure of middle schools often pose additional challenges to early adolescents' successful development. The majority of aggressive incidents among youth occur at school, and most often are not reported to adults. Concurrently students experience a substantial decline of teacher support across the middle school years, which is unfortunate given that student perception of teacher support is associated with fewer behavior problems. Lower delinquency and less peer victimization occurred in schools with rules that were clear and were perceived by students to be fair.

Instead, schools commonly use punitive consequences that remove students from the classroom and school activities. This removal is not effective at reducing problem behavior and academic progress increases as a sanction in middle school. The increased emphasis on punitive discipline exacerbates behavioral problems at school. Indeed, in far too many cases, the results of these efforts are to exacerbate emotional and behavioral problems and to contribute to rejection by non-deviant peers and the formation of friendships with other rejected students. These conditions also contribute to delinquency among aggressive students. Improvements are needed in middle school environments so that a more positive influence on social outcomes for youth can be achieved.

Staff Member Practices and Student Behavior

In a meta-analysis of 165 school-based programs aimed at preventing delinquency (86 of the studies involved middle schools), the largest effect sizes in reducing delinquency were for programs that involved school-wide behavior management interventions. Interventions that focused on the school social environment had significant effects on delinquency, alcohol and drug use, truancy, school dropout, and other problem behaviors. School-wide primary prevention efforts also provide a needed foundation for more focused behavioral interventions for individual students. Interventions involving school-wide behavior management strategies result in reductions in antisocial behavior, vandalism, aggression, later delinquency, and alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use. Providing clear expectations, monitoring students' behavior and consistently delivering positive reinforcement for students following expectations can reduce aggressive and disruptive behavior and increase cooperative behavior in middle schools.

Skinner's analysis

Skinner maintained that the goal of any science is to discover the lawful relationships among natural events in the environment. For psychology, this meant studying behavior and the events that change behavior. Skinner's experiments indicated that the immediate consequences of behavior are responsible for behavioral change. For example, an infant accidentally shakes a rattle, the action produces a sound (consequence) and the infant repeats the action again and ...