Although we are constantly making spatial decisions about where to place our objects and ourselves, few studies in psychology have investigated this phenomenon in-depth. In the current study, we examined how spatial decisions are made over time by tracking students' seating choices in classrooms over the course of a semester (i.e., 12 weeks). We…

This study investigated the effect of classroom settings on teacher-student interaction in higher education by comparing the behavioural sequences in smart classrooms (SCs) and traditional multimedia classrooms (TMCs). Twenty in-classroom teaching sessions were randomly selected from six universities in South China, involving 1,043 students and 23…

Establishing positive classroom expectations, or norms, that reflect the shared values of a classroom community (i.e., educators, students, families) is an important step toward creating a positive teaching and learning environment. This brief provides guidance for creating and using a classroom teaching matrix to explicitly identify, define, and…

Activities that are effective in supporting attention have the potential to increase opportunities for student learning. However, little is known about the impact of instructional contexts on student attention, in part due to limitations in our ability to measure attention in the classroom, typically based on behavioral observation and…

Teachers are faced with the challenge of selecting interventions that are most likely to be effective and best matched to the function of problem behavior. This article will define aspects of the instructional environment and describe a decision-making logic to select environmental variables. A summary of commonly used function-based interventions…

School consultants who rely on direct observation typically conduct observational samples (e.g., 1 30-min observation per day) with the hopes that the sample is representative of performance during the remainder of the day, but the representativeness of these samples is unclear. In the current study, we recorded the problem behavior of 3 referred…

Classrooms and other formalized settings have a predictable effect on student behavior and can be manipulated by educators to facilitate learning. (LH)

Authors examined four behavior patterns exibited by students in the classroom. (Editor/RK)

Differences in management and organizational skills of effective and less effective classroom managers are presented. Findings are drawn from extensive observations of 28 third-grade teachers who were observed from the beginning of the school year. Findings suggest that teachers who are successful managers arrange to prevent problems from…

Discusses the interaction, beyond the normal instructional scope, of elementary school students and their teachers with the emphasis on sex role behavior, reward seeking, and the differences in learning problems of boys and girls. (RK)

A system of categories organized along the three dimensions of behavior, location, and social setting, was developed and used to obtain recordings of the activity of pupils in open-area schools and traditional schools. (Author/JKS)

To determine the point at which successive days of classroom observation results in a reliable sample of behavior, a classroom of 30 kindergarten children was observed over a period of 18 days in four behavior categories. High correlations between running and total averages were obtained around the fourth day. (Author)

A multi-aged primary classroom environment was observed to determine (1) the degree to which teacher behaviors specified by developers of an adaptive learning environment (ALE) are actually exhibited by the teachers, (2) the nature of classroom processes and interactions between teachers and students in an ALE, and (3) the extent to which…

Reports results of a study of 274 4-year-olds in 17 half-day nursery classrooms, which examined: (1) the relationship between class size and individualization; (2) the influence of space on children's involvement in activities; and (3) the impact of various activity areas on children's and teacher's behavior. (ED)