Teachers
have every right to celebrate when they finally succeed in teaching struggling
students to use academic or behavioral strategies in their classrooms. Despite
this encouraging start, though, teachers often still face an important challenge
with their interventions. A frequent stumbling block to an effective intervention
outcome is that the student fails to transfer academic or behavioral strategies
to other settings or situations where those strategies would be most useful.
That is, students may not generalize their positive behavior changes, which
can greatly reduce the overall positive impact of classroom interventions.
To appreciate the importance
of generalization, consider these examples:
- Sarah, a 4th grade student,
has a one-year reading delay and needs lots of practice in reading to increase
her rate of decoding. However, she never picks up a book outside of school.
- Jack, an 8th-grader,
gets into fights frequently and has poor relationships with peers. He participates
in a social-skills group. When interacting with other students under the watchful
eye of the school counselor, Jack shows that he is able both to identify when
he becomes angry and employ several strategies to calm himself down. In unstructured
settings such as the lunchroom or hallway, though, Jack continues to get into
arguments and shoving matches with other students.
- Thomas has learned terrific
study skills in his 7th-grade social studies class. His class notes were once
a shambles-but now are neatly written and thorough. In science class, however,
Thomas' notes continue to be messy and incomplete, and his science test grades
suffer as a result.
While the student scenarios
presented here vary, they share a single characteristic: The student has failed
to transfer, or generalize, learned behaviors to new settings or situations.
When developing school-based
interventions, most educators simply 'treat and hope' (Rutherford & Nelson,
1988). That is, they put together research-based strategies to improve student
behaviors or academic performance-and then hope that the student will generalize
the successful strategies rather than explicitly train the student to apply
these new, more adaptive strategies to other situations in which they would
be useful.
There are several explanations
for why a student may fail to generalize a skill to a new setting or situation.
- One barrier to generalization
is that the student may not be able to identify relevant cues in the new setting
that would trigger that student's use of the target skill. For example, our
4th-grade student Sarah is not likely to read at home if there are few books
available there to remind her that she can choose to read as a leisure activity.
- A second barrier to generalization
may be that the student is not reinforced for using a target skill in the
new setting or situation. Thomas, the 7th-grader, takes polished notes in
social studies because the teacher praises and encourages him for his effort-but
he does not put effort into writing his science notes because the science
teacher pays little attention to note-taking
- As yet another generalization
barrier, a student's newly learned behaviors may be suppressed in specific
setting because the student's inappropriate behaviors continue to be unintentionally
rewarded, or reinforced, in that setting. So Jack, the 8th-grade student,
shows appropriate social skills in a group but does not transfer those same
skills to the hallway or lunchroom because he is powerfully reinforced with
plenty of peer attention when he gets into arguments and shoving matches with
other students. Jack is unlikely to try out new, socially appropriate ways
of interacting with peers in natural settings until his reinforcement for
engaging in the new behaviors outweighs the payoff he receives for the old,
maladaptive behavior.
The following are some ideas
that teachers can try when programming for generalization (McConnell, 1987;
Rutherford & Nelson, 1988; Stokes & Baer 1977; Stokes & Osnes, 1988).
While there are many more strategies for promoting generalization than are contained
in this handout, the tips outlined here do address challenges that teachers
commonly face in getting students to transfer skills to the settings or situations
in which they are most needed.
The student has learned
a skill or strategy well in one setting. The goal now is to have the student
transfer that skill or strategy to other appropriate settings. ('Generalization
to other settings')
- Prepare Strategy Sheets.
Once the student has mastered a skill or strategy in one setting, assist
the student in creating a 'strategy sheet' that captures in checklist format
the key steps that make up the strategy. Starting in the setting in which
the student already successfully uses the strategy, train the student to use
the checklist as an independent self-check to verify that he or she is implementing
the strategy correctly. (If the targeted strategy is 'note-taking', for example,
a strategy checklist might include items such as 'Brought paper and writing
materials to class', 'Sat near the teacher', 'Wrote down all key points',
'Highlighted unfamiliar vocabulary', etc.) Once the student has demonstrated
reliably that he or she can use the checklist correctly, meet with the student
and identify other settings where the student would benefit from using the
strategy. Make a list of those settings. Establish the goal for the student
that he or she will use the strategy in the new settings whenever appropriate.
Have the student log the times when he or she actually uses the strategy in
those new settings. Reward (and praise) the student for instances in which
the student successfully employs the skill or strategy under the appropriate
circumstances in the new setting.
- Encourage Other Teachers
to 'Coach' the Strategy. Talk
with other educators in your school who work with your student. Describe for
them the skill or strategy that your student is able to use reliably in your
classroom and that you would like to see generalized to other settings. Encourage
these educators to prompt the student to use the strategy when appropriate
in their classrooms. Request that your colleagues keep you informed-and be
sure to reward and praise the student whenever teachers outside of your room
report that the student has successfully used the strategy!
- Identify the 'Look-Fors'
That Trigger Use of the Strategy. '
Help your student to identify key characteristics--or 'look-fors'--of settings
in which he or she should use the selected skill or strategy. A student attempting
to generalize note-taking skills, for example, may identify 'The teacher lectures
to the whole class' as a signal that he should use his note-taking skills.
Another student may have learned to take a short discretionary time-out whenever
she becomes overly upset with difficult classwork. This student might define
'I try to do schoolwork and I feel a knot in my stomach' as a physical indicator
that she should use the time-out strategy, no matter what class she is attending.
As an additional support for generalization, inform other educators about
the particular strategy the student needs to use in other settings and the
key indicators the student has identified that should trigger his or her use
of the strategy. If these staff members notice that the student has overlooked
an opportunity to employ the strategy in their classrooms, they can approach
and prompt that student to use the strategy.
- Use a Skill Diary.
For academic skills or strategies, ask the student to keep a skill diary
in which the student records those situations or settings when he or she has
successfully used the strategy. Meet with the student periodically to review
entries and reinforce the student's efforts. When conferencing with the student,
ask to see examples of those student work products that were created using
the skill (e.g., copies of class notes, essays, completed math problems)-both
to verify that the student actually used the target strategy as claimed and
to check that the strategy is indeed helping the student to improve performance.
- Standardize Routines
Across Classrooms. Collaborate
with other teachers with whom you share students to develop a single, standardized
set of general behavior and academic management techniques across all of your
classrooms. Students often discover that teacher expectations vary dramatically
depending on the classroom they happened to be sitting in. In fact, when faced
with differing expectations across classrooms, students are likely to view
each room as a separate kingdom governed by its own set of unfathomable rules.
We should not be surprised, then, if students who move among highly variable
classroom environments fail to generalize skills learned in one of these settings
to others. In contrast, when a student encounters uniform academic routines
and behavioral expectations in each classroom, that student is more likely
independently to generalize adaptive academic and behavioral skills and strategies
from one setting to all settings.
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The student has responded
well to an intervention that includes reinforcement for appropriate behaviors.
Now the teacher wants to fade the reinforcement or make the program easier to
manage while maintaining the positive behavioral effects. ('Generalization
to other reinforcers')
- Transition the Student
From Rewards to Privileges. Create a set of privileges that you believe
the student is likely to find motivating. Sample privileges might be: 'The
student is allowed to walk independently through hallways without adult supervision.'
'The student may be selected by the teacher to run errands' etc. When the
student displays a stable period (e.g., several weeks) of behavior improvement
under the individualized reinforcement program, meet with the student to praise
the improvement. Let the student know that you plan to discontinue the reward
program because the student has shown that he or she can now be trusted to
transition to higher-level privileges. Review those privileges with the student.
Let the student know that he or she can continue to access the classroom privileges
so long as the student continues to show good behaviors.
- Pair Rewards With
Naturally Occurring Classroom Reinforcement. Identify opportunities that
naturally occur in your classroom to positively reinforce the student. Examples
include teacher or peer praise, social interactions, exposure to interesting
learning opportunities, and improved grades. As the student earns rewards
under his or her individualized reinforcement program, pair those 'artificial'
rewards with natural reinforcers that also appear to motivate the student.
For example, a teacher
finds that a behaviorally challenging boy in her class responds very well
to praise-but only when that praise is delivered in a private conversation
rather than publicly. So whenever the teacher pulls the student aside to give
him an earned reward, she uses that opportunity to quietly praise his effort.
Eventually, the teacher lets the student know that his behavior has improved
to the point where the reward program can be discontinued. However, she continues
to meet with him for brief, private 'pep talks', during which she continues
to praise his sustained behavioral gains. In this example, praise-a reinforcer
naturally available in the classroom--is now maintaining the student's behavioral
improvements, having replaced the more artificial set of rewards previously
needed to shape the student's behavior.
- Transition from Individual
to Classwide Rewards.
Create a menu of classwide incentives for appropriate behavior that can be
accessed by any student. (For example, any student in the class who displays
good behaviors through an entire day may be allowed to spend the last 10 minutes
of class in a supervised activity at the gym.)
Your eventual goal
is to replace a target student's individualized rewards with the class menu
of rewards. Once a target student is able to bring his or her behaviors into
line through the use of individualized incentives, the student can be weaned
off those individual rewards and instead join peers in selecting earned reinforcers
from the classwide reward menu. This approach has two advantages: First, a
classwide reward system is often highly motivating and may well bring about
substantial improvements in the entire group's behaviors. Second, the target
student becomes more fully integrated with 'typical' peers when he or she
is able to share in their rewards.
- Give the Student Responsibility
for Monitoring Behaviors and Earned Rewards. As
the target student demonstrates behavioral success, train that student to
monitor his or her own behaviors (e.g., using a daily self-monitoring chart).
Inform the student that he or she is responsible for (1) tracking those self-ratings,
(2) noting when a reinforcer has been earned, and (3) approaching the teacher
to receive a reward. Of course, the teacher should occasionally 'spot-check'
the student's self-ratings to ensure that the student is accurately rating
his or her behaviors.
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Changes in the classroom
environment are required to fully support the student's behavior changes.
('Modifying the setting to support target behavior')
- Teach the Student
to Recruit Reinforcement. Train the target student to seek reinforcement
from others in appropriate ways that support his or her behavioral targets.
For example, a student whose attention often wanders during independent seatwork
may be trained to politely and quietly ask a peer for help in understanding
directions or finding his place in a group assignment. Or a student who often
fails to complete classwork but finds teacher attention to be very motivating
may be taught to 'recruit' teacher praise by reliably turning in completed
assignments that demonstrate her best effort.
- Train Peers to Be
Helpers. Teach classmates routines for providing friendly assistance to
one another. Training peers as helpers can foster a positive learning environment,
one in which your target student is more likely to be reinforced for taking
risks and trying out new, positive behaviors.
For example, you
might train students to assist peers who lose their place in assignments,
politely redirect neighboring students whenever they engage in distracting
off-task behaviors during learning activities, or check in with 'peer buddies'
at the end of the day to make sure that they have written down their homework
assignments correctly and have the necessary materials to complete their homework..
Reward these peer helping behaviors with praise. Also consider the option
of assigning 'prize-points' to student helpers that can be redeemed for rewards
or privileges.
- Institute a Classwide
Reward System. Put a classwide reward system in place to suppress group
negative behaviors that can disrupt the learning environment and undermine
a target student's attempts to try out new, appropriate behaviors in the class
setting. A teacher might set up a simple group reward program, for example,
in which the entire class is awarded 20 'good behavior' points for each morning
and 20 points for each afternoon in which they show consistently positive
behavior. The class is promised a pizza party when they have accumulated 1200
points. However, the group will fail to earn points in a given morning or
afternoon if they persist in negative behaviors after two teacher warnings.
Negative behaviors might include talking during teacher-directed lessons,
laughing at another student's misbehavior, or engaging in teasing or putdowns.
A group behavior plan can help to improve the learning environment and also
prevent a target student from being picked on by peers or being encouraged
to misbehave.
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Other generalization
challenges:
- Diversify Student
Responses. Your student may have successfully learned a very narrowly
focused behavior but not yet learned how to generalize that behavior to a
larger 'response-class' (group of functionally equivalent behaviors). For
example, a teacher may have a child with cognitive delays who has learned
to greet people by saying "hi" but has not yet learned to generalize
his response by accessing a larger pool of possible greetings (e.g., "Good
morning", "Hello", "How are you?"). In this situation,
that instructor might first explicitly teach the student a range of acceptable
variations on the learned behavior, next reinforce the student for appropriate
use of varied examples from the larger response class in a controlled setting,
and finally reinforce the student for using generalized behaviors in real-world
settings.
You may also want
to teach the student to distinguish between examples and non-examples of a
response class so that the student can eventually judge independently whether
a particular behavior is appropriate for use within the context of a specific
setting or situation. To return to our example, the teacher might train the
student to hear a word or phrase and be able to indicate whether it is or
is not typically used as a social greeting.
- Help the Student to
Retain Skills Over Time. Your student appears to have mastered a strategy
or skill during one class session but seems to have forgotten that skill by
the next class session ('generalization across time').
Here are some ideas
to try:
Create a checklist
for the student that contains the essential steps of the skill or strategy.
Have the student adopt a routine of previewing the steps of the checklist
just prior to the class or activity in which the student will need to use
the strategy. (An eventual goal may be to have the student memorize the key
steps of the strategy-perhaps by condensing those steps into an acronym or
other memory technique.)
A group instructional
strategy that strengthens skill retention is for the teacher to open a class
lesson with a brief review of a previously taught skill or concept. Kicking
off the lesson with a quick review of previous content will prime your target
student with the essential steps of the strategy precisely when he or she
will need the information to apply to the current lesson. And your whole class
will be more likely to retain past instructional material through this review.
If your student
has difficulty in recalling a strategy, don't be too quick to jump in with
the answer. Instead, consider using 'partial prompts'. Partial prompts give
your student hints about how to proceed in his or her problem solving without
simply supplying the answer: They are instructional questions or directives
that offer the student just enough information to recall the next step in
the strategy or skill. Then the student is encouraged to continue with the
assignment independently if possible. If a student is stuck on a long-division
math computation problem, fir instance, the teacher may say, "Point to
the number that you will be dividing….Now point to the number that you
will divide by…Tell me what the next step is that you will follow."
Partial prompts require students to remain active participants in academic
work, rather than allowing them to assume a posture of learned helplessness.
And, finally, don't
overlook this simple tip: Ask the struggling student to 'think aloud' by stating
what he or she remembers of the skill or strategy that should be used. You
may be surprised to discover that the student is able to accurately recall
most of the strategy and needs only minor teacher assistance to solve the
problem or complete the assignment.
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References
McConnell, S. R. (1987).
Entrapment effects and the generalization and maintenance of social skills training
for elementary school students with behavior disorders. Behavioral Disorders,
12, 252-263.
Rutherford, R.B., &
Nelson, C.M.. (1988). Generalization and maintenance of treatment effects. In
J.C.Witt, S.N.Elliott, & F.M.Gresham (Eds.) Handbook of behavior therapy
in education (pp. 277-324). New York: Plenum Press.
Stokes, T.F., & Baer,
D.M. (1977). An implicit technology of generalization. Journal of Applied
Behavior Analysis, 10, 349-367.
Stokes, T.F., & Osnes,
P.G. (1988). The developing applied technology of generalization and maintenance.
In R. Horner, G. Dunlap, & R.L. Koegel (Eds.), Generalization and maintenance:
Life-style changes in applied settings (pp. 5- 20). Baltimore: Brookes.
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