Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) often receive low rates of teacher praise and high rates of teacher reprimands, though they may respond more positively to praise and more negatively to reprimands than their typically developing peers. Teacher praise-to-reprimand ratios (PRRs) are associated with increased student engagement,…

Middle school is a cornerstone for success in high school. However, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement of adolescents often decline as they transition from elementary to middle school, resulting in lower school grades and more challenging behaviors, especially for adolescents with or at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders…

In the United States, many teachers feel underprepared to manage student classroom behavior positively. Such management is crucial for students to learn effectively, especially those with or at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). Although increasing teacher praise and decreasing teacher reprimands may be research-based practices,…

Classroom management is a common challenge in middle schools. Class-wide Function-Related Intervention Teams (CW-FIT) is a multi-tiered intervention designed to decrease problem behaviors at the classroom level (Wills et al., 2010). It is comprised of evidence-based practices such as teaching classroom expectations, increasing teacher praise, and…

Presents the negative-reinforcement paradigm as a framework with potential to guide development of interventions that increase desirable and decrease undesirable behaviors of students with disabilities. Studies involving children with emotional and behavioral disorders are presented to convey the importance of teachers' awareness of the paradigm's…