Students with disabilities or who are at risk for disabilities, and from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds typically receive disproportionately more negative consequences in schools, including office disciplinary referrals and referrals for special education evaluation. In an effort to decrease the overrepresentation of culturally,…

In this article, we describe and evaluate the extent to which recent changes to state-level policy are related to seclusion and restraint in schools and detail what components of comprehensive restraint and seclusion policy are indicated. We examined state policy documents and coded them for the presence of specific characteristics related to…

Students who engage in challenging behaviour compromise the fundamental ability of schools to educate children. Consequently, teachers face the daunting task of designing effective strategies to promote positive educational outcomes for their students. Since the 1997 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act amendments, the use of positive…

"Play-based interventions" are practices designed to improve socio-emotional, physical, language, and cognitive development through guided interactive play. During play sessions, an interventionist uses strategies including modeling, verbal redirection, reinforcement, and indirect instruction to sustain and encourage child play…

In 2008, the "Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions" ("JPBI") celebrated 10 years in publication. As the flagship journal of positive behavior support (PBS), it is important to periodically examine the research published in "JPBI" to determine whether it reflects the basic principles of PBS, to explore the ways in which PBS is being…

In recent years, there have been major concerns expressed regarding the use of restraint and seclusion to control the behavior of children with disabilities and/or challenging behavior. In May of 2009, for example, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released findings regarding a number of cases in which seclusion and restraint were…

Trying to manage the problem behaviors of one or two students in the classroom can take teachers away from valuable instructional time with all students. However, these problem behaviors can be reduced and student engagement increased by teachers implementing effective behavior management strategies. 2008). Because behavior management is only one…

This study sought to examine the effects of training mands on the emergence of tacts with the same response forms. Results indicated that training adjective sets as mands resulted in the emergence of adjective sets as tacts under modified, but not standard, antecedent conditions. The findings suggested that the apparent functional independence of…

We evaluated the addition of stimuli after the praise statement of a trial (instructive feedback) in which the stimuli were not attached sequentially to the target stimuli. All students reached criterion level responding of target behaviors despite the extra information presented, and three of four high school students with disabilities acquired…

Research on the effects of concurrent schedules of reinforcement during treatment of problem behavior has shown that response allocation can be biased in favor of adaptive responses by providing increased reinforcement for these responses. However, this research has focused on the effects of only two concurrently available response options. In…

This study evaluated the effects of an experimenter-delivered choice-making procedure. Three nonambulatory and partially ambulatory preschoolers were given access to six teacher-nominated preferred toys in two conditions: child choice and interventionist choice. Using an alternating treatment design and a 10-second momentary time-sampling…

This paper presents a description of ongoing work of an Alberta school district that is working to support and enhance effective inclusive practices that reach and teach every student. The district is implementing a Pyramid of Supports model that is built upon four critical elements: a belief in social justice and the value of every child, a…

The current study examined the accuracy of the multiple-stimulus without replacement (MSWO) preference assessment for identifying preferred common classroom activities as reinforcers with children with behavioral disorders. The accuracy of predictions from the MSWO regarding high, medium, and low stimulus preference was tested by providing…

The Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS) is the second-largest public school system in Pennsylvania. The state has only one other major big-city school system--Philadelphia's. The school district has made substantial gains in student achievement over the last several years, significantly increasing the numbers of students at the proficient level in…

Scholars in the field of special education put forth a series of papers that proposed quality indicators for specific research designs that must be present for a study to be considered of high quality, as well as standards for evaluating a body of research to determine whether a practice is evidence-based. The purpose of this article was to pilot…