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Schools are facing challenges in their efforts to educate children appropriately and safely. Students who demonstrate inappropriate, anti-social, and/or disruptive behaviors are becoming more prevalent. School personnel are dealing with disruptive behaviors that occur more frequently and that affect staff and student safety. Additionally, the lack of discipline or management of disruptive behaviors has been identified by the public as the most persistent and possibly the most troublesome issue facing schools ( Cotton, 2001; Elam, Rose, & Gallop, 1998; Fitzsimmons, 1998; Killion, 1998). An assumption in managing problem behaviors in many urban schools is that punishment will change behavior. According to Skiba and Peterson (2000), severe and penalizing disciplinary policies frequently produce a negative school environment rather than improving student behavior. In general, urban schools across the nation rely on suspensions, loss of privileges, reprimands, and or expulsion as means of discipline. Unfortunately, these reactive consequences only help a small number of children learn to "comply with general expectations" and are insufficient for many students who exhibit more challenging behavior problems. This study examines the disciplinary practices being used in two urban middle schools to control disruptive behavior of students. It will reveal what aspects of certain disciplinary practices are viewed as helpful as well as areas needing improvement. It will also give insight into whether selected urban school principals and other stakeholders are using proactive strategies and techniques demonstrated in the research literature as being the most effective in terms of changing inappropriate behavior. Undertaking this study through the application of qualitative research methods of inquiry as a study using interviews, examining relevant documents, and observations will allow me an opportunity to explore my personal reactions to the defined disciplinary practices in the identified schools. / Ed. D.

The aim of this study is to explore and analyze the employee's experiences of using low arousal approach as a method in residential care homes. It is also done to better understand the employee's experiences, challenges and successes by using low arousal approach as a method with young people who show challenging behavior due to situations that makes them lose control over their behavior. The method used to answer the chosen questions is a qualitative method in the form of semi-structured interviews. This specific method was chosen because it allows for an in-depth exploration of our chosen topic. To answer the chosen questions, we have interviewed 6 employee's from one residential care home. These interviews provided a deeper understanding of their experiences with using the method and the advantages and disadvantages of applying it as a behavior management method. Their experiences with the method indicate that it is helpful when a child or young person with behavioral problems exhibits challenging behavior, as it helps to prevent the situation from escalating. Based on the interviews, we were able to conclude that there are more advantages than disadvantages. The method leads to strong relationships, greater understanding and positive behavioral change. The disadvantages include that over time, employee's may forget how to act in problem creating situations. The focus over time may shift more towards creating a calm working environment rather than helping the children or young people with behavioral problems who need assistance. In conclusion, with the help of the 6 semi structured interviews, the study was able to gain deeper insight into the employee's experiences, situations and the advantages and disadvantages of using the method while working with behavioral problems in residential care homes for children and young people.

No / Challenging behaviours (behaviour difficulties) represent a problem of considerable clinical significance for learning disability nurses, and a source of much human distress. Gentle teaching is a relatively new approach to dealing with behavioural difficulties, and has been received with enthusiasm by clinicians, but has so far received little empirical support. The current study attempted to compare gentle teaching with a well-established alternative (behaviour modification) and a control group. Objectives. To examine the comparative effectiveness of gentle teaching, behaviour modification and control interventions for challenging behaviour amongst children with learning disabilities. Design. Nonrandomized controlled trial. Setting. Service users¿ homes in East Yorkshire. Participants. Seventy-seven children who presented with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour (behaviour difficulties) and their parents. Procedure. One-day workshops in were offered by recognized authorities in either behaviour modification or gentle teaching that were not otherwise involved with the research project. Forty-one participants were recruited to the gentle teaching condition; 36 to behaviour modification; 26 to the control group. Random allocation was not possible, because of the slow uptake by interested parents. Measures was preintervention, and at assessment points up until 12 months following intervention. Analysis. Quantitative analysis of pre¿post differences between the groups, using t-test. Results. In general, no significant differences were found between the treatment groups and controls. Significant improvements were found for both gentle teaching and behaviour modification children over controls on the AAMR ABS XVII (social engagement) subscale. Controls had more contact with medical practitioner (GP) services than behaviour modification children and less than gentle teaching children. Conclusion. Although very few differences were found between the three groups, those that did exist generally favoured behaviour modification. Implications for service provision and learning disability nursing practice are described.

Studiens syfte är att undersöka och förstå hur ett antal lärare resonerar kring sina möten med elever i behov av särskilt stöd. Fokus på studien ligger på undervisning i helklass och inte i mindre undervisningsgrupper. Mina frågeställningar utgår ifrån hur lärare beskriver pedagogiska situationer när de blir som bäst och när de känner att de lyckas i sina möten med elever i behov av särskilt stöd. Vad lärare upplever som utmaningar i möten inom klassrumsmiljön och vad inkludering av elever i behov av särskilt stöd betyder för lärare. Metoden för studien är en kvalitativ innehållsanalys med sex genomförda semistrukturerade intervjuer på två olika låg-och mellanstadieskolor. Resultatet presenteras i form av rubriker som skapats i analysen av intervjuer genom kodord och kategorier: Lärares syn på inkludering, Pedagogiska metoder och Samverkan och nätverk. Resultatet lyfter fram att lärarna i studien beskriver vikten av att kunna stödja enskilda elever så att de blir en del av gruppen. Lärarna anser att det är avgörande att lära känna eleven och skapa en relation. Resurspersoner är även en viktig förutsättning för elevers inkludering. Ett hinder kan vara tidsbrist för att klara av att ge både enskilda och övriga elever tillräckligt med stöd. Självreflektion är en gynnande pedagogisk metod och även samarbete med framför allt föräldrar och övriga professioner. Att skapa struktur och tydlighet genom förhållningssätt, anpassat material och miljö är mycket betydelsefullt för barn i behov av särskilt stöd. Min studie har visat att det behövs en medvetenhet om vad som påverkar inkludering. Att möta elever med ett utmanande beteende är någonting som ger upphov till olika uppfattningar och förhållningssätt hos lärare. Går det som lärare att skapa ett förtroende hos föräldrar ökas inkluderingsmöjligheterna stort.

The purpose of the study was to compare traditional functional analysis procedures (isolated contingencies) to functional analysis procedures which are modified to include nuanced environmental variables (synthesized contingencies) for children in an outpatient setting in order to determine sensitivity to the isolated or synthesized contingencies. A multi-element design embedded into a multi-treatment design was used to evaluate differentiated rates of challenging behavior across the two analyses for three children exhibiting challenging behaviors. The results supported the utility of the traditional functional analysis (FA) procedures when compared to that of the interview informed synthesized contingency analysis (IISCA) for one of three participants.

Self-injurious behaviors (SIBs) are relatively common in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and many teachers have difficulties dealing with these challenging behaviors. Besides the possibility of causing serious injuries to children with ASD, the frequent occurrences of SIBs can limit their access to academic instruction and peer interactions. The abundance of possible strategies is confusing for teachers to figure out which strategies to use and how to implement them. The purpose of this project was to develop a guiding manual for educators working with children with ASD. The manual presents proactive, evidence-based strategies to help prevent or decrease students’ SIBs in the classroom.

The understanding and treatment of challenging behaviors in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder is paramount to enabling the success of behavioral therapy; an essential step in this process being the labeling of challenging behaviors demonstrated in therapy sessions. These manifestations differ across individuals and within individuals over time and thus, the appropriate classification of a challenging behavior when considering purely qualitative factors can be unclear. In this thesis we seek to add quantitative depth to this otherwise qualitative task of challenging behavior classification. We do so through the application of natural language processing techniques to behavioral descriptions extracted from the CARD Skills dataset. Specifically, we construct 3 sets of 50-dimensional document embeddings to represent the 1,917 recorded instances of challenging behaviors demonstrated in Applied Behavior Analysis therapy. These embeddings are learned through three processes: a TF-IDF weighted sum of Word2Vec embeddings, Doc2Vec embeddings which use hierarchical softmax as an output layer, and Doc2Vec which optimizes the original Doc2Vec architecture through Negative Sampling. Once created, these embeddings are initially used as input to a Support Vector Machine classifier to demonstrate the success of binary classification within this problem set. This preliminary exploration achieves promising classification accuracies ranging from 78.2-100% and establishes the separability of challenging behaviors given their neural embeddings. We next construct a multi-class classification model via a Gaussian Process Classifier fitted with Laplace approximation. This classification model, trained on an 80/20 stratified split of the seven most frequently occurring behaviors in the dataset, produces an accuracy of 82.7%. Through this exploration we demonstrate that the semantic queues derived from the language of challenging behavior descriptions, modeled using natural language processing techniques, can be successfully leveraged in classification architectures. This study represents the first of its kind, providing a proof of concept for the application of machine learning to the observations of challenging behaviors demonstrated in ASD with the ultimate goal of improving the efficacy of the behavioral treatments which intrinsically rely on the accurate identification of these behaviors.