This article suggests that students with emotional/behavioral disorders may use disruptive behaviors to escape and avoid teacher instructional language for which they do not have comprehension skills and thus find aversive. Teacher instructional language thus maintains aberrant behavior through a negative reinforcement paradigm. Recommendations…

Three ninth-grade male students with emotional or behavioral disorders were taught game-related social skills of appropriate peer reactions and appropriate reactions to losing and winning. A skills-training model involving social modeling, behavior rehearsal, and behavior transfer was used, as was self-monitoring. Transfer to the gym setting and…