Behavioral Skills Training in Portuguese Children With School Failure Problems

Abstract

This paper postulates that psychology can make an important contribution at an individual level to help children with school failure problems in a context where too little applied research has been conducted on the instructional needs of these children. Some data are analyzed, revealing that, despite some progress, school failure is still a main educational problem in many countries. In this study, Behavioral Skills Training (BST) was applied in Portugal to train children with school failure difficulties. BST is a method based on Applied Behavior Analysis, a teaching package consisting of a combination of behavioral techniques: instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback. Two empirical studies are presented. Their main purpose was to develop behavioral diagnostic and training techniques to teach lacking skills. School success was defined in terms of a set of skills proposed by teachers and school failure as a lack of one or more of these skills. The main instrument was a package of training programs to be applied in three areas: basic behavior (precurrents), academic behavior, or social behavior. The second instrument is a package of check-lists, aimed to determine the level of performance of the child in an area. This check-list was applied before (pre-test) and after (post-test) training. In the first study, 16, 7- to 8-year old children were trained. They were attending the second or third grades and having academic difficulties of different origins. The effects of the training programs are evaluated in terms of percentage of attained objectives, comparing a pre- and a post-test. The results showed an increase in correct responses after training in all cases. To provide a sounder demonstration of the efficacy of the training programs, a second study was carried out using a quasi-experimental design. A multiple baseline design was applied to three 10- to 11-year-old children, referred by teachers because of learning difficulties in the fourth grade. Results showed few performance changes without training. Increases in behavior following BST were evident in all cases, indicating that training generated improvement in all three children. In both studies, comparable results occurred across students, demonstrating replication of the effects of the training programs.

Treinamento de Habilidades Sociais no Contexto Escolar: Revisão Sistemática

“…A. P. Del Prette et al, 1998;Fornazari, Kienen, Vila, Nantes, & Proença, 2014), a amostra era caracterizada por professores do ensino regular ou especial e todos ocorreram no Brasil. Entretanto, o maior número de publicações (4), trouxeram alunos como sujeitos de pesquisa (Choi & Heckenlaible-Gotto, 1998;Murta, 2005;Han et al, 2005;Galindo et al, 2018), distribuídos em: Ensino Fundamental-séries iniciais (2), Ensino médio…”

“…A. P. Del Prette et al, 1998;Choi & Heckenlaible-Gotto, 1998;Murta, 2005;Han et al, 2005;Fornazari et al, 2014). Em dois deles (Baker-Henningham et al, 2009;Galindo et al, 2018), a finalidade foi caracterizar comparativamente a competência dos professores diante de seu repertório social. No que diz respeito ao delineamento de pesquisa dos artigos, verificou-se que apenas um não se enquadrava no quantitativo, pois tratava-se de um estudo de caso que serviu de base para a organização de uma tipologia de classes e subclasses de desempenho em sala de aula.…”

“…Nos estudos internacionais (Choi & Heckenlaible-Gotto, 1998;Han et al, 2005;Galindo et al, 2018), foi observada a utilização de instrumentos voltados à análise do comportamento como a Escala de Avaliação de Pares criada por McGinnis, Goldstein, Sprafkin e Gershaw (Choi & Heckenlaible-Gotto, 1998); Pré-K RECAP desenvolvido por Han (2001), manuscrito não publicado (Han et al, 2005). Um estudo (Galindo et al, 2018) utilizou escalas de avaliação de comportamento e de atmosfera da sala de aula. Foram encontrados nos estudos a aplicação de questionários sociodemográficos e outros específicos elaborados pelos autores.…”

High School Failure, a Systematic Review in the Social Sciences

“…Therefore the cause of failure at school depends exclusively on personal abilities [40; 41]. Within non-achievement, there would also be considered deficiencies in the studentʼs intrinsic skills and qualities [42], cataloguing them as abnormal [43]. The latter would cause a type of failure that would even be understood as affecting the studentʼs life trajectory [44], proving an age gap [45; 46]; as well as a permanent need to legitimise himself in the eyes of others [47], as a result of this deficiency.…”

Problemas de Aprendizagem e Comportamento no Ciclo 1 do Ensino Fundamental

“…Tais fatores podem ser de natureza intrínseca, abarcando as capacidades cognitivas do aluno, ou extrínseca, relacionados aos ambientes escolar e familiar (Rotta, 2016). Dados do contexto escolar português indicam que 22,4% das crianças entre 6 e 12 anos têm algum tipo de problema de aprendizagem na escola (Galindo, Candeias, Pires, Grácio, & Stuck, 2018).…”