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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Teacher Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1411743

Using Differential Reinforcement for All to Manage Disruptive Behaviors: Three Class Interventions at Kindergarten and Primary School

Provisionally accepted
Pascal Pansu Pascal Pansu 1*Irène Freyssinet Irène Freyssinet 1Benjamin Le Hénaff Benjamin Le Hénaff 2
  • 1 LaRAC, Université Grenoble Alpes, Saint Martin d'Hères, France
  • 2 Laboratoire de Psychologie, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté, Besançon, Franche-Comté, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Disruptive behaviors produce harmful effects, which reduce students' well-being and learning opportunities. This paper presents a new strategy named Differential Reinforcement for All (DR-All), which has been inspired by DR and Social Learning Theory. We conducted one study in which we applied DR-All to three classes with first grade students (intervention 1), then in kindergarten (intervention 2), and fifth grade students (intervention 3). In all three interventions, the measurements of student-student relationships and disruptive behaviors were taken one week before implementation and after two weeks of implementation. In intervention 1, disruptive behaviors were measured again one year after, among the 10 students who remained with the same teacher the following year. Concerning student-student relationships, we only observed one effect, which was a positive effect on the most rejected pupils in the first-grade intervention, who were significantly less rejected by their classmates after the implementation. However, the results of all three interventions showed a significant decrease in the frequency of disruptive behaviors after the strategy implementation. This was also true for the intervention 1 measurement one year later. To conclude, the consistent application of DR-All can reduce disruptive behaviors in the classroom.

    Keywords: disruptive behaviors, Differential reinforcement, Normative focus, primary school, social learning theory

    Received: 03 Apr 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Pansu, Freyssinet and Le Hénaff. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Pascal Pansu, LaRAC, Université Grenoble Alpes, Saint Martin d'Hères, France

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