Many school systems are adopting three-tiered models of prevention (e.g., Response to Intervention and Positive Behavior Support) to support an increasingly diverse student population (Sugai, Horner, & Gresham, 2002). A central feature of these models is that data are monitored to determine responsiveness. We offer this paper as a guide for…

In this article, the authors examine the psychometric properties of the Student Risk Screening Scale (SRSS), including evaluating the concurrent validity of the SRSS to predict results from the Systematic Screening for Behavior Disorders (SSBD) when used to detect school children with externalizing or internalizing behavior concerns at three…

The focus of this volume is to identify and review issues and outcomes associated with behavioral concerns of students with learning and behavioral disabilities. Students must navigate a number of environmental conditions, task demands, and social interactions with peers and adults throughout the school day. To be successful, they must employ a…

Little is known about the academic processing speed (i.e., rapid automatic naming and academic fluency) of children and adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) served in public school settings. A cross-sectional design was used to investigate the (a) percentage of K-12 students with EBD served in public school settings with…

Examination of the effects of difficulty level of academic tasks on the behavior of 2 subjects (ages 9 and 12) with severe behavior disorders found that difficult tasks were generally associated with lower percentages of time-on-task and higher percentages of time engaged in disruptive behavior than were easy task conditions. (Author/DB)

This study observed a classroom of 15 students (ages 3 to 11) with behavior disorders, using amount of teacher attention to generate hypotheses about problem behavior function which were then validated in individual functional assessments. For 14 of the students, accurate hypotheses were efficiently generated by noting how teachers distributed…

A modified time sampling procedure that measured behavioral rate and duration was used to record stereotypic and on-task responding in 11 students (ages 11-17) with severe emotional and behavioral disturbances. For both types of behavior, response duration exhibited less variability than response rate, and noncorrespondence between the two…

Two elementary school students with emotional/behavioral challenges increased task engagement and reduced disruptive behavior when allowed to choose academic tasks. The effects of choice making were distinguished from preference, by yoking a no-choice phase to a previous choice-making condition; the yoked control phase was inferior to the…

This article suggests that students with emotional/behavioral disorders may use disruptive behaviors to escape and avoid teacher instructional language for which they do not have comprehension skills and thus find aversive. Teacher instructional language thus maintains aberrant behavior through a negative reinforcement paradigm. Recommendations…