Most approaches for dealing with student disruptions involve the use of various forms of punishment such as removals from the classroom, fines, restitutional activities, inschool and out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions. Although some of these approaches may make schools safer by removing the offending students, they have little effect on encouraging students to perform socially appropriate behaviors. There are many reasons why educators find punishment a more acceptable approach for managing students' challenging behaviors than positive reinforcement. This article delineates these reasons and argues for educators to plan the occurrence of positive reinforcement to increase appropriate behaviors rather than running the risk of it haphazardly promoting inappropriate behaviors.

Teaching social skills to students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) has become an accepted practice. Literally hundreds of social skills training (SST) efficacy studies for students with EBD appear in the literature. As a result, many authors have published both narrative and meta-analytic reviews of the literature. Reviews have highlighted various problem areas as targets for future research. Nevertheless, SST has subsequently often resulted in only modest changes in the social competence of students with EBD. The purpose of this article is to review the reviews on SST with students with EBD, discuss issues based on conclusions reached, and present implications for practice.

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Researchers have found that students with learning disabilities (LD) obtain statistically higher scores on measures of depression than their peers without LD. However, what is not known is whether students with LD display greater levels of clinical depression than their peers without LD. If they do, then special education services should address this area of concern. If they do not, then the current mental health system may be adequate to treat children and adolescents with depression regardless of whether they have concomitant LD. The purpose of this study was to meta-analyze the data-based literature and quantify mean differences in depression measure scores and levels of clinical depression between students with and without LD.

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