Increasing On-Task Behavior Through Positive Reinforcements

Annotated Bibliography

Classroom activities and off-task behavior in elementary school children

One of the most difficult situations that teachers find themselves is ensuring that students pay maximum attention during classes. According to researchers, maintaining focus is one of the important aspects of successful learning. Researchers say that environment plays a huge role in the way kids pay attention while in class. There is a strong link between kids’ cognitive skills and the attention they pay during classrooms. Off-task behaviors also contribute hugely to this problem of losing attention during class time. Observers argue that they end up having negative impact on kids’ learning( Rainwater & Rainwater, 2008).

Researchers are finding it hard to find ways of overcoming off-task behaviors among students and teachers during class times. The reason behind this is that they fail to come up with sufficient evidence that cause the off-task behaviors among students. According to the authors of this article, there are various factors that lead to off-task behaviors among students. However, these factors tend to vary from one region to another. They include; weather conditions such as snow, rain, sudden interruptions for example announcements and students’ physical and psychological conditions. According to researchers, students use around 10 per cent and 50 per cent of their instructional time in off-task behavior. It is difficult to ascertain the exact amount of time students’ use in off-task behavior as limited research has been done on the issue. This has led to some researchers investigating the impact that classroom design has on students’ attention while in class. For instance, classes that have large amount of items being...

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...ution for this undesirable behavior, particularly there are solutions that should be taken before the occurrence of undesirable behavior. For example, the first article come up with sufficient evidence that cause the off-task behaviors among students and these factors are vary from region another like the weather conditions, announcements and students’ physical, psychological conditions, and classroom design.

However, in the second article, I found something interesting that caused huge impact on student attention. These factors are the academic level and difficulty of the academic curriculum. This new literature tends to focus on the environment that triggers this behavior in students rather focus on the reward and the positive reinforcement and I am very excited that I'm going to try these solutions for disruptive behaviors Instead of positive reinforcement.