The Efficacy of Virtual Positive Behavior Support in a Special School for Students with ASD

Abstract

In response to the demand for adopting a social justice system to manage students’ challenging behaviors, many countries are implementing positive behavior support (PBS) programs at the school level. However, the use of PBS in Saudi Arabian schools is still a goal rather than reality. It is strongly evident that school-wide PBS can be applicable to different educational contexts. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a virtual school-wide positive behavior support program for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Saudi Arabia. Teaching and reinforcement procedures were implemented to help the students replace interfering classroom behaviors with alternative, appropriate behaviors. Observations were conducted to collect data on the students’ classroom behaviors. The results of the study showed that there was an immediate and major improvement in the students’ behaviors upon the introduction of the program. The results support the conclusion that school-wide positive behavior support can be successfully applied to different educational settings and suggest several implications for special and general education schools.

Interventions addressing challenging behaviours in Arab children and adults with intellectual disabilities and/or autism: A systematic review

“…Four of these studies were rated as high‐quality, with two interventions well described (Gobrial, 2017; Tounsi et al, 2022) and two studies having an acceptable level of intervention reporting (Abdel Raheem et al, 2010; Al‐Ajami & Al‐Nwaiser, 2016). Karima's (2017) and Alwahbi's (2022) studies were rated as medium quality, and the interventions were well‐reported.…”

Bibliographic Analysis of Research Trends in Positive Behavior Support*

“…Utilizing meta-analysis, Van Camp et al (2020) 2022) conducted a meta-analysis to determine the characteristics of the model of preschool MTSS, its effectiveness across diverse conditions, and its applicability to various populations. Alwahbi (2022) analyzed the effectiveness of using PBS for students with Autism Spectrum Disorders in special education schools using meta-analysis. Over the past half-decade, many studies have used meta-analysis to demonstrate the effectiveness of PBS (Hirsch et al, 2020;Radley et al, 2023;Smith, George, & Prado, 2017).…”