Focus,Scope, and Practice of Behavioral Consultation to Public Schools

SUMMARY

Public school districts frequently seek professional consultation to improve educational services. This article is an overview of the focus, scope, and practice of behavioral consultation to public schools. A four-stage process of consultation is described, followed by a discussion on the expanding role of behavior support intervention. Next, the involvement of consultants in the design of individual-student, classroom-wide, and whole-school programs is considered. Contemporary approaches to consultation are presented such as positive behavior support, functional behavioral assessment, and efficacy evaluation that targets natural data sources. A concluding section sets forth recommendations for the successful practice of public school behavioral consultation.     

The Role of Public Education in Place-Remaking: From a Retrospective Walk Through my Hometown to a Call to Action

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the role of public education in the process of place-remaking that relies on a false separation between teaching and issues of race, politics, and power. I construct a historical case study of my hometown that presents a counter narrative, presented by students, of race and legacy in the context of a public school and the surrounding community. Building upon a walk-as-method approach, I illustrate the confluence of historical, racialized narratives that are discoverable at the scale of the city but invisible within the walls of the school. I conclude with an in-progress professional code of ethical teaching and research practice for the learning sciences. These commitments are intended to support and protect students (and all young people in our communities) from bearing sole responsibility for critical stances based on their identities and histories-in-place.     

Preschool Teacher Support Through Class-Wide Intervention

Abstract

Preparing professionals for class-wide consultation has a significant role in achieving goals associated with recent legislation and reform initiatives. Class-wide interventions are used to target achievement and social learning, are under a teacher's control and responsibility, and build on basic classroom interactions, routines, and resources. However, teachers may require considerable contextual appraisal and support from consultants. The purpose of this paper is to describe a teacher- support program evolving from Head Start consultations by school psychology students. Implications for training and practice are discussed.     

Effect of Teachers' Stereotyping on Students' Stereotyping of Mathematics as a Male Domain

Abstract

This multilevel analysis used data from a representative sample from Grades 6, 7, and 8 in public schools in Switzerland. The data included information on (a) 6,602 students (3,307 girls, 3,295 boys) nested within 338 classes and (b) 321 mathematics teachers of these classes. The teachers and the students tended to stereotype mathematics as a male domain, and the teachers' stereotypes significantly affected the students' stereotypes after the author controlled for achievement, interest, and self-confidence in mathematics and for school grade and schooling track.     

Organizational school psychology: Issues and considerations

School psychologists have been encouraged to become actively involved in facilitating organizational change in public schools. Activities such as organization development, administrative-centered consultation, training of multidisciplinary teams, program planning, and program evaluation have been considered as important aspects of school psychology. However, when the practice of school psychology at the organizational level of public schools is considered as a distinct area, a range of conceptual and practical issues become apparent: (a) What is the nature and scope of organizational-level practice of school psychology? (b) Under what conditions may this kind of professional effort be useful, to whom, in what ways? (c) What are the knowledge and skills necessary for effective organizational-level practice? These issues are addressed in this article through delineation of the emerging area of “organizational school psychology (OSP),” an approach to school psychology practice which complements more established approaches that focus directly on the individual child or on groups of children.     

Development and Implementation of a Sport Psychology Program in an Urban High School

SUMMARY

This article is based on a dissertation of the author that was centered on the process of developing a sport psychology program at the high school level. The program was developed to address academic, mental, social, and emotional needs of student-athletes and coaches. This sport psychology program, which was developed in the Linden Public School District, a large urban district in New Jersey, may be the first such program documented on a national level. In this dissertation, the author, who was a school psychologist in the district, utilized a particular program planning and evaluation framework, with attention to the first two phases-clarification and designto develop and implement a sport psychology program.     

Duties When an Anonymous Student Health Survey Finds a Hot Spot of Suicidality

Abstract

Public health agencies regularly survey randomly selected anonymous students to track drug use, sexual activities, and other risk behaviors. Students are unidentifiable, but a recent project that included school-level analysis discovered a school with alarmingly prevalent student suicidality. Given confidentiality protocols typical of surveillance, the surveyors were uncertain whether and how to intervene. We searched literature for duties to warn at-risk groups discovered during public health surveillance, but we found no directly applicable guidance or cases. Reasoning by analogy, we conclude that surveyors should contact the school’s leaders to call attention to its outlier status, but public warning is unwarranted. However, such an ad hoc decision to issue a warning, even if only to school leaders, raises significant practical, legal and ethical issues. National public health and education associations should produce guidance that clarifies ethical and legal duties owed to schools and students involved in population health-risk surveillance.     

A Survey of Behavior Analysis and Behavioral Consultation Courses in School Psychology: Implications for Training School Psychologists

All 216 doctoral and specialist level school psychology training programs were mailed a seven question survey to determine how much behavioral consultation and behavior analysis course work school psychology students are offered. One hundred and twenty-eight surveys were returned, yielding a return rate of 58.26%. The results indicated that almost all programs offer didactic courses in consultation (98.79%) and behavior analysis/behavior modification (91.52%). The percentage of practicum devoted to behavioral consultation and behavior analysis/modification was considerably less (about 25% for each) than other subject areas. The results are discussed within the context of training needed to meet the needs of practitioners in the areas of behavioral consultation and behavior analysis/behavior modification.     

A School-Based,Primary Violence Prevention Program

Summary

This article presents findings from an evaluative study of a multidisciplinary violence prevention project jointly administered by a family practice clinic and junior high school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The project team hypothesized that an intervention established on a public health model and aimed at enhancing adolescent self-esteem through cognitive and behavioral strategies would reduce the tendency to engage in violence of participating students. The project united health care personnel, social workers and legal profession-als in an effort to teach students specific cognitive tools for the reduction and avoidance of violent encounters. The experimental results do not reveal Project effectiveness in boosting self-esteem indicators among students, although the Project docs seem to have contributed to the control of students' behavioral aggression. Although a clear relationship between self-esteem and violent behavior is not demonstrated by the experimental results, the project study suggests that school-based, anti-violence programs based on a public health model can have a positive effect in the reduction of physical and verbal aggression among adolescents.     

Charter School Enrollment Effects: A Review of Results from Recent Large-Scale Studies

Responding to calls for increased accountability regarding performance of students in public schools and concerns over the capacity of public schools to improve outcomes, school choice has become a mainstream and often controversial issue in public education; it is also a priority of the current federal government administration. Given the mixed evidence of effects on academic performance of charter school enrollment, along with the common perception that charter schools fail to meet the needs of special populations of students—including students with disabilities and English language learners (ELLs)—this study examined the performance of these subgroups across traditional public schools and charter schools. Specifically, we reviewed five recent large-scale studies that assess the impact of charter schools on academic performance paying particular attention to how students with disabilities and students identified as ELLs fare in charter schools relative to their peers served in traditional district schools.     

Training School Psychologists in Behavior Support Consultation

SUMMARY

Although school consultation began as a means of providing assistance to individual teachers on a voluntary basis, it has evolved into a stand-alone service regulated by state and federal law. In order to meet the demand for increased accountability in the services they provide, school psychologists and other prereferral intervention team members have expressed a need to develop skills in two key areas: (a) selecting interventions that are conceptually relevant and therefore likely to be effective in responding to children's behavior problems, and (b) providing teachers with the resources and support needed to ensure successful plan implementation. In this paper, we describe various strategies that have been shown to be effective at addressing each of these issues by drawing on recent research in school consultation and applied behavior analysis. Considerations surrounding the use of these strategies by school consultants are discussed, as are implications for increasing the effectiveness and accountability of school consultation services.     

Beliefs of teachers versus non-teachers about people who stutter

PurposeAlthough prior research has investigated teachers’ beliefs about people who stutter (PWS), this work has not indicated how these beliefs compare with those of the general public or taken into account key demographic variables that may be related to these beliefs. The main purpose of this study was to evaluate whether beliefs about PWS in teachers are different from those in the general public. The second purpose of this study was to examine whether gender is related to beliefs about PWS for teachers, who are more frequently women.MethodsAnalyses were based on questionnaire responses regarding beliefs about PWS from 269 teachers and 1388 non-teachers in the United States. Due to their potential link to beliefs about PWS, familiarity with PWS and sociodemographic variables were included in the statistical model for this study.ResultsTeachers’ beliefs about PWS are no different than those of people in non-teaching professions. Findings also indicated that, regardless of whether respondents were teachers, women had more accurate beliefs about PWS than men. The statistical model tested indicated that beliefs about PWS were more accurate when the respondents were older, had more education, and had familiarity with a PWS.ConclusionIn the first study to compare teachers’ beliefs about PWS to the general public, findings indicated that teachers are no more accurate than the public in their beliefs about PWS. Associations found between these beliefs and several variables may indicate some promising mechanisms for improving beliefs, such as increased familiarity with individuals who stutter.Educational Objectives: Readers should be able to: (a) describe stuttering's potential effects on children's participation in the school setting; (b) identify actions teachers can take to improve the school experience of their students who stutter; (c) summarize findings regarding teachers’ beliefs about people who stutter (PWS); (d) identify key variables that are associated with beliefs about PWS.     

Improving student bus-riding behavior through a whole-school intervention

We describe a multicomponent intervention to improve bus-riding behavior of students attending an urban public school. The intervention was developed with technical assistance consultation that emphasized collaboration among students, school personnel, and bus drivers. The primary intervention procedures were identifying appropriate behaviors during transportation ("bus rules"), training bus drivers to deliver positive reinforcement, and rewarding student performance through a weekly school-based lottery. Disruptive bus behaviors, as measured by discipline referrals and suspensions, decreased with intervention relative to baseline phases in an ABAB reversal design. These positive results were maintained over the long term, with school personnel assuming responsibility for intervention in the absence of ongoing consultation.     

Effects of an early reading intervention based on grapho-syllabic decoding and fluency training in French elementary schools

IntroductionStudies conducted in recent decades have led to the development of instructional interventions to help prevent or eliminate a large proportion of reading difficulties. However, few experiments have been conducted in French schools.ObjectiveAims for this research were to create, implement and evaluate a remediation program for French students with reading difficulties up to the end of elementary school.MethodThis paper examines the effects of a decoding-skills and fluency-based intervention on 133 struggling readers in second- to fifth-grade. Depending on the nature of their reading difficulties, students were given a year-long training based either on grapho-syllabic conversion — focusing on syllable units, rather than phonemic units, is considered a promising way of helping French-speaking beginning readers — or on repeated reading techniques, used to improve fluency.ResultsIncreases in written-word identification scores were greater for students who followed the program than they were for a control group of 184 students with reading difficulties who did not follow the program.ConclusionThe results show that programs combining early evaluation of written-word identification abilities followed by a year-long series of remediation sessions focusing on specific difficulties can help students progress in written-word identification. However, further research is needed to examine why our program was less effective with children from disadvantaged (“éducation prioritaire”) areas.     

A Comparative Analysis of the Effects of Alienation on Public and Private School Females

The levels of alienation of American female school students (N = 431; 256 public, 175 private) were assessed to determine the extent of the influence of the school environment on the student's level of alienation and the dimensions of isolation, normlessness, and powerlessness. It was hypothesized that substantially different school settings would have no significant effects because student alienation is influenced by a series of complex environmental factors. The Dean Alienation Scale (1961) was used to assess levels of alienation. There were no significant differences in terms of total alienation and powerlessness. Private school students, however, were more isolated (p < .001) and public school students had higher levels of normlessness (p < .05).     

A Self-Modeling Intervention for High School Students with Public Speaking Anxiety

ABSTRACT

The study investigated the effectiveness of self-modeling as an intervention for public speaking anxiety. The participants were six high school students with elevated levels of self-reported public speaking anxiety. Students presented public speeches to randomly selected peer audiences. Direct observations measured the behavioral manifestations of public speaking anxiety. In the intervention phase, students viewed self-modeling videotapes that were edited to remove speech dysfluencies and behavioral symptoms of speech anxiety. The self-modeling tapes depicted only adaptive, exemplary behavior with an edited-in audience feature making it appear that the students were producing a fluent speech to an audience of their peers. All of the participants evidenced substantial decreases in behavioral symptoms of speech anxiety and these changes were maintained throughout follow-up. The range of the participants' effect sizes was 2.7 to 4.9. Self-report measures of state anxiety and confidence as a speaker were used to assess additional effects of treatment. For all participants, there were also substantial decreases in self-reported public speaking anxiety and state anxiety from baseline to follow-up. A post-treatment interview revealed high social validity and self-reported generalization of treatment.     

Training teachers in behavioral consultation and therapy: An analysis of verbal behaviors

This study evaluated the relative effectiveness of two teacher-training packages under two analogue consultation conditions in a 2 × 2 completely randomized factorial design. The subjects were 56 elementary school teachers in an urban school district in Arizona. The conditions included a training package of classroom behavior modification and consultation, a training package of consultative service procedures, and general multidisciplinary team processes (a nonspecific control). The consultation conditions included one variant in which very specific consultant questions were presented, and a second in which much more general, somewhat vague, consultant elicitors were presented to subjects in problem-identification, problem-analysis, and problem-evaluation behavioral consultation analogue interviews. The effectiveness of these training packages was evaluated in respect to knowledge of behavior modification principles and concepts, and the frequency of specific categories of consultee verbal behaviors. The results indicated that the experimental training package was effective in increasing teachers' knowledge of behavioral procedures and in increasing the frequency of teacher verbalization regarding overt child behaviors and behavioral intervention plans during the problem identification and problem analysis phases of consultation. It was also found that even after training, specific consultant questions were important in eliciting consultee statements related to environmental conditions surrounding behavior. The use of more general consultant verbal behaviors resulted in significantly more vague, unspecified, and irrelevant types of consultee verbalizations. Implications for future research are discussed.     

PREVENTING SCHOOL VANDALISM AND IMPROVING DISCIPLINE: A THREE-YEAR STUDY

Vandalism is a major problem facing educators and taxpayers alike. The present investigation analyzed how vandalism costs and student disruption were related to the implementation of a training and consultation package designed to increase the reinforcing ambience of the school. A positive environment, it was posited, would displace previous events that may have set the occasion for vandalism, with cues to promote productive school performance. Eighteen elementary and junior high schools were involved over a 3-year period. Using a delayed treatment control design, treatment was delivered following either 4 or 13 months of baseline. During treatment, teams of school personnel attended training workshops in behavioral strategies for reducing vandalism and disruption by students in school. Each team also met regularly on its campus to plan and implement programs on a schoolwide basis. To demonstrate that reinforcing procedures were actually implemented and accompanied by change in student performance, these variables were periodically probed throughout the study. Project staff also provided consultation. Vandalism costs decreased significantly (p < .05) more in treatment than control schools, with an average reduction of 78.5% for all project schools. Rates of praise delivered by project teachers and other randomly selected teachers in the school increased significantly (p < .05), and rates of off-task behavior by students decreased significantly (p < .05) following treatment. The staff development model used in this study appeared to be both feasible and economical.     

Verbal,mathematics, and physical education self-concepts and achievements: An extension and test of the Internal/External Frame of Reference Model

ObjectivesThe Internal/External Frame of Reference Model (I/E model; e.g., Marsh, 1986) posits that verbal achievement (Ach) produces a lower mathematics self-concept (SC) and that, conversely, mathematics Ach fosters a lower verbal SC after controlling for prior Ach in each domain. The present study extended this model by adding another school subject that has not been previously investigated, namely physical education (PE). The central goal was to verify whether Ach in PE positively or negatively predicts academic SC in the mathematics and verbal domains.DesignProspective study over one school year.MethodsParticipants were 451 French high school students (mean age = 13.5). Ach scores in mathematics, French and PE were gathered at the beginning of the school year. At the end of this one, students completed a questionnaire to assess their SC in the three school subjects. Results: Structural Equation Modelling results revealed, according to the I/E model, negative paths between mathematics Ach and verbal SC, and between verbal Ach and mathematics SC. Results also revealed singular relationship patterns between the two traditional school subjects and PE. A positive path between PE Ach and mathematics SC was observed whereas the path with the verbal SC was non-significant.ConclusionPE could have benefits to increase SC in other school subject such as mathematics. Broader implications of results for the I/E model are discussed.