Do troublesome pupils impact teacher perception of the behaviour of their classmates?

Abstract

The widely supported wish for more inclusive education places ever greater expectations on teachers' abilities to teach all children, including those with special needs and challenging behaviours. The present study aimed at the question whether teachers judge pupil behaviour more negatively if there are more children with difficult behaviour in class. The teachers of 184 classes in 31 regular primary schools were asked to complete the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ-L) for 3649 pupils. Six linear mixed models were carried out with as independent variable the number of pupils that teachers perceived to have 'abnormal behaviour' , and the class mean without these pupils as the dependent variable. For all SDQ-L subscales-emotional problems, behavioural problems, problems with hyperactivity, problems with peers, poor prosocial behaviour and total problems-the number of pupils perceived as problematic was associated with less favourable teacher perceptions of the rest of the class. The results of this study are a plea for a contextual perspective on pupil behaviour in class, both where teachers are asked to report on individual pupils, as well as where interventions are done on emotional and behavioural problems in class.

The advantages of an ADHD classification from the perspective of teachers

“…Conceptions and judgments about ADHD classification do not easily abstract from the context in which teachers work. The modern, classroom-wide and inclusive educational practice that teachers are engaged in, brings with it the understanding that the behaviour of other children will influence the behaviour of any one child (Wienen et al 2018) and that for teachers judging behaviour self-evidently involves situation-based comparisons. In a broader social context in which educational performance is a major criterion for judging pupils' development, deviant behaviour and deviant performance have been turned into an attractive causal chain for a biomedical conception and explanation.…”

The relative impact of school‐wide positive behavior support on teachers’ perceptions of student behavior across schools, teachers, and students

“…Our results showed less effect of SWPBS for teachers who perceive high levels of emotional problems or problems with peers in their classrooms. Perhaps this is caused by the fact that the more students in a class a teacher perceives to have severe problems the more negatively s/he will perceive the behavior of the remaining students in the class (Wienen, Batstra, Thoutenhoofd, Bos, & De Jonge, ), and so the less improvement the teacher perceives. It may also be possible that teachers whose perception is more negative in general will be less successful in implementing the SWPBS approach.…”

Disciplinary exclusion: wicked problems in wicked settings

“…Such knowledge sharing is reliant on climates of trust which may be difficult in settings where exclusion is an accepted solution to diverse views on behaviour. If, for example, a parent views the behaviour of their child as a product of the school environment (Ule, Živoder and Du Bois‐Reymond, 2015) and those who created that environment see problematic behaviour as a product of the home environment (Wienen et al., 2019), common ground is unlikely to be found. Positions and boundaries that create wicked problems cannot be understood via tests and a climate of testing does little to address the complexity of exclusion.…”