A review, published in Review of Educational Research, analyzes the evidence on The Good Behavior Game (GBG), a classroom management program that has been used (and studied) for 40 years. Strategies in the program include acknowledging appropriate behavior, teaching classroom rules, providing feedback about inappropriate behavior, verbal praise, and providing rewards as reinforcement. A total of 22 studies met the authors’ inclusion criteria. In these, the program was mainly being used in mainstream elementary schools with externalizing, challenging behaviors (e.g., disruptive behavior, off-task behavior, aggression, talking out, and out-of-seat behaviors). The review aimed to describe and quantify the effect of the GBG on various challenging behaviors in school and classroom settings. The findings suggested that: The GBG had moderate to large effects on a range of challenging behaviors, and that these effects were immediate. Correct application of reward procedures was found to be important for intervention effectiveness. The authors note that...

A meta-analysis of classroom management interventions has found that they improved academic, behavioral, and social-emotional outcomes. Published in the Review of Educational Research, the study included 54 classroom management interventions in 47 studies published between 2003 and 2013. It included some interventions that had been evaluated several times (including Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS), the Good Behavior Game, and Zippy’s Friends). About three-quarters of the studies were carried out in the U.S., with the remainder in Europe and Canada. Most interventions were focused on changing students’ behavior (85%), improving students’ social-emotional development (74%), or changing teachers’ behavior (54%). Only two interventions were specifically targeted to improving teacher–student relationships. The analysis found that: There was an overall effect size of +0.22 for the interventions, with a slightly higher effect on behavior (+0.24), and less on social-emotional (+0.21) and academic (+0.17) outcomes. There was no significant effect on motivational outcomes. The analysis also indicated that...

Researchers from the University of Oxford’s Department of Education conducted a meta-analysis to examine what effect peer assessment interventions have on academic performance. Published in Educational Psychology Review, the meta-analysis evaluated the effect of peer assessment on academic performance when compared to no assessment and teacher assessment. Fifty-four studies were included in the meta-analysis, of which 45% were with school-age students. Studies had to examine the effect of peer assessment on non-self-reported measures of academic achievement and have a control or comparison group, using no assessment, teacher assessment, or self-assessment. The findings from the analysis indicated that: Overall there was a significant positive effect of peer assessment on academic performance compared with no assessment (ES= +0.31) and teacher assessment (ES = +0.28). The effect size was similar when peer assessment compared with self-assessment (ES = +0.23) though this result was not significant. The effect sizes were slightly larger for school-age children than undergraduates....

A study published in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness reports on the impact of Word Generation on academic language, vocabulary, and reading comprehension outcomes for students in grades 4 to 7. Word Generation (WG) is a vocabulary program designed to teach academic vocabulary words through English, math, science, and social studies classroom activities. For this study, 7,725 4th to 7th grade students from 25 schools in the northeast U.S. were randomized within pairs to either treatment or business-as-usual control conditions. In treatment schools, the program was implemented throughout the school year. In grades 4 and 5, this involved 12 ten-day long units of 45-50 minutes per day. For grades 6 and 7, the program was implemented in six-week long units designed to take 45 minutes each day in science and social studies classes. The results showed: At the end of the first year, students in grades 4 and 5 also made...

A report from the Institute of Education Sciences has found that an intensive approach to providing support for using student data to inform teaching did not improve student achievement, perhaps because the approach did not change teachers’ use of data or their reported classroom practices. For the study, researchers recruited 102 elementary schools from 12 U.S. districts. Schools were randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. Treatment schools received funding for a half-time data coach of their choosing, as well as intensive professional development for coaches and school leaders on helping teachers use student data to inform their teaching. The control schools received no additional funding for a data coach or professional development. Impacts on teacher and student outcomes were measured after a 1.5 year implementation period. The results suggest that : Despite the additional resources, teachers in the treatment schools did not increase how often they used data...

In irony worthy of Shakespeare, out-of-school suspensions have typically been used as punishment for students who are truant (absent from school without parental consent) or chronically absent (missing 10% or more of school days). Given that the goal is to keep students in school and academically engaged, a few states have banned this practice. A recent JESPAR article examined the effects of this ban on absence rates in Arkansas, which established a law in 2013 banning out-of-school suspensions. The state offered no training to schools, and each was left to make its own way with the policy change. Although out-of-school suspensions were banned, other punishments were allowed to continue, including in-school suspension, which takes a student out of the regular classroom for a time but allows them to continue their work elsewhere. Using data from all K-12 Arkansas public schools, researchers compared the attendance of truant and non-truant students between 2012–13 (pre-policy) and 2013–14 (post-policy) to...

While the impacts of feedback on students’ learning are well-known, it is less clear what factors influenced the ways teachers providing feedback. To help rectify this, an article published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology has examined how teachers’ perceptions of task difficulty and views of intelligence influence whether and how they give feedback.  This study was conducted among 169 English teachers from Chinese primary schools attending an English Summer school for enhancing teacher skills. Teachers were given six scenarios to read, each of which described a lesson where the teacher asked a designated student to complete a task. In three of the scenarios, the student succeeded, while in the other three scenarios, the student failed. After reading each scenario, teachers were asked to rate their perception of task difficulty, the likelihood of giving feedback, and the likelihood of giving person and process forms of feedback. Moreover, teachers completed a measure...

A study published in Educational Psychology examines how different approaches to rewarding students affected their spelling scores and prosocial behavior for different ability levels. A total of 1,005 students, aged 9 and 10, in 28 classes were recruited from three primary schools in Singapore. Classes were randomly assigned to one of five reward conditions: competitive, cooperative, individualistic, cooperative-competitive, and cooperative-individualistic. An ABABA (A= implementation, B = withdrawal) design was used for each condition, and students’ spelling scores were tracked over a period of 10 weeks. Teachers were asked to rate students’ prosocial behavior before and after the study. The results showed that The different conditions did affect students’ spelling scores and prosocial behavior, but that these effects depended on ability level, such that different conditions were more effective for different ability levels.  Across all five conditions, only the cooperative-competitive condition resulted in increased spelling scores and prosocial behavior across all three ability groups,...

An independent evaluation in the UK of Stop and Think: Learning Counterintuitive Concepts has found evidence of a positive impact in math and science outcomes for students in Key Stage 2 . The Learning Counterintuitive Concepts project, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation and Wellcome, aimed to improve science and math achievement for Year 3 (7-8 year olds) and Year 5 (9-10 year olds) using an intervention called Stop and Think. When learning new concepts in science and math, students must be able to inhibit prior contradictory knowledge and misconceptions to acquire new knowledge successfully. Stop and Think is a computer-assisted learning activity that aims to improve a learner’s ability to adapt to counterintuitive concepts by training them to inhibit their initial response, and instead, give a slower and more reflective answer. The randomized controlled trial involved 6,672 children from 89 schools across England. The intervention was delivered to the whole class...