Effects of an Applied Behavior Analysis Workshop on Nursery School Teachers' Skills for Dealing With Children's Problem Behavior

Abstract

The present study examined the usefulness of objective measures for evaluating effects of a 2-session applied behavior analysis workshop for nursery school teachers whose pupils include children with behavior problems. Participants, 10 nursery school teachers, took a test before and after the workshop about inferring causes of and planning solutions for preschool children's behavior problems. The participants' answers were categorized on the basis of the behavioral functions that they had identified, specifically, the number, percentage, and speed of correct answers; the number of categories identified; and the degree of correspondence between the causes named and the solutions proposed. These indices were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the workshop both quantitatively and qualitatively. After the workshop, the number and speed of identifying correct answers and the number of categories of inferred causes increased significantly. However, the number and speed of identifying correct answers in planning solutions and the percentage of answers in which causes and solutions were matched did not increase significantly. Although generalization of these results is limited by the small number of participants and the lack of randomized selection, the findings suggest that the indices used in the present study may be useful for measuring nursery school teachers' skills in dealing with children's behavior problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (journal abstract)