This article presents guiding principles governing the design, implementation, and management of a point system to promote discipline and academic rigor in a secondary classroom. Four considerations are discussed: (1) assigning appropriate point values to integral classroom behaviors and tasks; (2) determining the relationship among consequences,…

Conjugate reinforcement is a new attention measure which has emerged from experimental psychology. It can provide accurate measurement of a subject's attention to a stimulus. In conjugate reinforcement, the duration of the stimulus varies directly and immediately with the subject's rate of response. In this process, the subject must demonstrate…

This study examined effects of social praise on attentive behavior of reinforced and nonreinforced children. Two pairs of mentally retarded preschool boys served as subjects. Results revealed that intervention procedure increased the attentive behavior of the target subjects and nonreinforced subjects also increased their attentive behavior during…

An attempt was made to modify the attending, on-task behavior of hyperkinetic children in a naturalistic school setting. The boys were taught how to "pay attention." The procedures utilized were based on previous research findings regarding the performance of hyperkinetics on a vigilance monitoring task. (Author)

Three highly distractible female students, aged 9 through 11, with mild to moderate mental handicaps completed a 5-step training process followed by student self-monitoring with no tangible extrinsic reinforcement for improved performance. Results found increased on-task behavior in all subjects and increased academic productivity in two.…

Thirteen studies were conducted that focused on whether preschool and elementary school students with mild and moderate disabilities learned target and non-target behaviors when two types of instructional manipulations were made to direct instructional trial sequences. In one type, the related, non-target behaviors were presented during…

This instructional module describes procedures for training prospective and practicing teachers to use two strategies for enhancing the efficiency of instructing children with mild disabilities: manipulating attending cues and responses and using instructive feedback. The module contains the following information: (a) a description of the…