The Achievement Plus Curriculum: Intervention for Secondary Students At-Risk for Emotional Disturbance

    

    There is a need to help students that are at-risk for Emotional Disturbance.  In an effort to help these students a class was designed, developed and inplemented to help work with these students.  This class was called Acheivment Plus and was made an elective within the school.  The curriculum for the class targeted the following four key areas of instruction: Self-management, Social skills, Emotional resiliency, and Academic strategies.  To help motivate the at-risk students music, literature, video, history and a variety of other objects and teaching tools were used.  Some of the behavioral interventions that were used in the class by the teacher were effective and instructive praise, corrective teaching, and direct teaching.

    The students that were in the class were selected using a modification of the Systematic Screening for Behavior Disorders (SSBD).  There were approximately 4,000 students from two experimental schools and two control schools that were screened.  Teachers were asked to nominate 2 to 5 students exhibiting behavior problems.  After the initial screening and ranking, the data was sumarized categorically, and each student was assigned a frequency score.  The frequency score was the number of teachers who nominated a particular student.  The students were then randomly assigned to experimental and control groups.  The experimental group received intervention within the Achievement Plus class.

    Part of the research behind the class was to look at the effectiveness of the class as compared to a wait-list.  Did the class increase academic performance and decrease behavioral  and academic difficulties?  What components of the Acievement Plus class contributed to positive behavior change?  To help improve the class anecdotal and descriptive data was obtained from teachers and students to help identify strengths and weakenesses.

 

If you would like to see the presentations as they were presented at the conference you can find them here.  To view the files you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader ©.

This information was presented in two confrence presentations.  One of the presentations was presented at the 28th annual TECBD National Conference©.  It was presented by Andrew Armstrong, Darlene Anderson & Ellie Young.

Secondary-level Interventions for Students At-Risk for Emotional Disturbance: What We Learned from a Pilot Semester of Achievement Plus

The second presentation was presented at the 28th annual National Conference on Severe Behavior Disorders of Children and Youth.  It was presented by Becky Kraner, Ben Young, Andy Armstrong, Ruel Haymond, JoAnn Munk, Darlene Anderson, & Ellie Young.

The Achievement Plus Curriculum: Interventions for Secondary Students At-Risk for Emotional Disturbance