William L. Heward

Teaching Middle School Students with Learning Disabilities to Recruit Positive Teacher Attention

Four middle school students with learning disabilities were taught to recruit teacher attention while they worked on assignments in two inclusive general education classrooms. The students were taught to show their work to the teacher two to three times per session and make statements such as: “How am I doing?” Training was conducted in the special education classroom and consisted of modeling, role-playing, corrective feedback, and praise. A multiple baseline across students design showed that recruitment training increased (a) the rate of recruiting by the students, (b) the rate of teacher praise received by the students, (c) the rate of instructional feedback received by the students, and (d) the accuracy with which students completed their workbook assignments.

Teaching Students to Recruit Positive Attention: A Review and Recommendations 1

Positive teacher attention and praise are powerful influences on student performance in the classroom. But the classroom is a very busy place, a place where important efforts by students can easily go unnoticed. In such instances, an existing and potentially effective natural contingency of reinforcement is “asleep” and needs to be “woken up.” Teaching students how to recruit positive teacher attention is one way to activate dormant contingencies of reinforcement and help students take a proactive role in their learning. This paper reviews the recruiting research to date, discusses implications for practitioners, proposes a recruitment training package including strategies for promoting generalization of recruiting skills, and offers recommendations for future research.

Teaching Middle School Students with Learning Disabilities to Recruit Peer Assistance During Cooperative Learning Group Activities

Four 8th graders with learning disabilities were taught to recruit assistance from peers during cooperative learning activities in two general education classrooms. The students were taught to show their work to a peer and make statements such as:“Can you help me?” or “How am I doing so far?” Training was conducted in the special education classroom and consisted of modeling, role playing, corrective feedback, and praise. A multiple baseline across students design showed that recruitment training increased (1) the rate of recruiting responses by the students, (2) the rate at which the students received instructional feedback and praise from peers, and (3) the productivity and accuracy with which the students completed their language arts assignments.

A Comparison of Active Student Response and On-Task Instruction on the Acquisition and Maintenance of Health Facts by Fourth Grade Special Education Students

An alternating treatments design was used to compare the effects of active student response (ASR) and on-task (OT) instruction on the acquisition and maintenance of health facts during small-group lessons. Five students with learning difficulties (4 students identified as developmentally handicapped and 1 student identified as learning disabled) participated in daily instruction on weekly sets of 20 unknown health facts (10 facts assigned to the ASR condition and 10 to the OT condition). During ASR instruction, the teacher modeled the correct response to a health question that was presented visually on a health fact card, and the students immediately repeated the correct response in unison three times. During OT instruction, students attended visually to the health fact card as the teacher modeled the correct response. All 5 students made more correct responses on end-of-day tests on health facts taught with ASR instruction than they did on health facts taught with OT instruction. ASR instruction also produced consistently superior results on maintenance tests administered 2 weeks after instruction.

A Comparison of Least-to-Most Prompts and Progressive Time Delay on the Disruptive Behavior of Students with Autism

We compared the effects of two instructional strategies on the frequency of errors and episodes of disruptive behavior of 4 students with autism. In Phase I, easy and difficult tasks were presented to determine whether the tasks were associated with differential rates of disruptive behavior. Phase II compared the effects of a least-to-most prompting procedure (LTM) to a progressive time delay procedure (PTD) on errors and disruptive behavior when difficult tasks were presented. Observers sequentially recorded instructor instructions, response prompts, prompts for appropriate sitting, and feedback statements; and student disruptive, correct, error, and no responses during 1:1 sessions. Results showed PTD produced fewer errors than LTM for all 4 students, and lower rates of disruptive behavior for 2 students. When PTD was implemented as the final phase with 2 of the students, rates of disruptive behavior associated with the task previously taught with LTM immediately decreased. Conditional probability statements indicated that disruptive behavior occurred infrequently with all 4 students when effective response prompts were used.

Effects of active student response during error correction on the acquisition and maintenance of geography facts by elementary students with learning disabilities

An alternating treatments design was used to compare the effects of Active Student Response (ASR) error correction and No Response (NR) error correction during instruction of the capitals of states and countries. Three students with learning disabilities were provided one-to-one daily instruction on four sets of 14 unknown capitals (7 ASR capitals and 7 NR capitals). Student errors during instruction on ASR capitals were immediately followed by the teacher stating the capital and the student repeating it (an active student response). Errors on NR capitals were immediately followed by the teacher stating the capital while the student visually attended to a geography card with the correct capital handwritten on it (an on-task response). During instruction each of the three students correctly stated more capitals taught with ASR instruction than he or she stated with NR error correction. Results of same-day and next-day tests show that all three students learned more capitals with ASR error correction than with NR error correction The students also correctly stated more ASR error correction capitals on 1-week maintenance tests.

Tutor Huddle: Key Element in a Classwide Peer Tutoring System

Providing sufficient individualized instruction to every student in the class is a constant challenge to an elementary school teacher. Computer-assisted instruction (Magidson 1978), programmed texts (Kneller & Hackbarth 1977), and selfpaced instruction (Keller 1968) are all effective methods of individualizing instruction. Two factors that have limited the implementation of these approaches in the early grades are the cost of purchasing the hardware and the fact that students must possess prerequisite skills in order to use these learning systems. In addition, none of these approaches can give the student the many levels of prompting, personalized feedback, and praise that are so important during the beginning stages of

Using Choral Responding to Increase Active Student Response

More than 70 years ago, Dewey (1916) emphasized that students learn by doing. But educational researchers have only recently rediscovered this essential variable in the teachinglearning formula. Investigators who use the research methods of group comparison/statistical inference and their colleagues who favor repeated measures/single-subject analysis have followed strikingly similar paths in the past decade and a half. Both groups have consistently found the same relationship in a long and still-growing series of studies involving learners of all ages and characteristics.

“GOTCHA!” Twenty-Five Behavior Traps Guaranteed to Extend Your Students' Academic and Social Skills:

Describes effective natural reinforcers that teachers can use in the classroom to help students develop positive and constructive knowledge and skills

Student Performance Data in the Classroom Measurement and Evatuation of Student Progress

We conducted a survey to determine the use of measurement and evaluation procedures by special education teachers. A 70-item questionnaire was completed by 510 teachers in two large metropolitan school districts. Results indicate that the majority of teachers believe data collection is important and that they collect, record, and use data on student performance to determine instructional effectiveness, when to move students to the next skill, and which IEP objectives have been met. Teachers primarily collect accuracy rather than frequency data. Only one third of the teachers completing the survey use graphs for displaying and interpreting student performance data.