Baltimore City Public Schools
Sheppard Kellam - Senior Research Fellow
The experiences children receive in first-grade classrooms are vitally important in determining later academic, mental, and behavioral health. Aggressive, disruptive behavior in first grade is a major risk factor for academic failure, later school drop-out, delinquency, drug abuse, depression, and other problems.
With funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Sheppard Kellam and Dr. Jeanne Poduska are leading AIR’s efforts to develop the Good Behavior Game, which involves helping children learn how to work together to create a positive learning environment. They are integrating the findings of prevention science and education research to develop programs that offer at risk youngsters a chance for the future they deserve. The prevention programs do not compete for academic instructional time.
Recently, first lady Laura Bush cited AIR’s work. “The Good Behavior Game helps teachers manage their classrooms and it balances discipline and academic instruction,” she said at George Washington Elementary School in Baltimore. “This model is simple and inexpensive and it can work for children in schools across our country.”
The long-term benefits among high risk children are significant:
- 86 percent of GBG participants attained a high school diploma, compared with a rate of 19 percent among similar students who did not participate in the program.
- 99 percent of non-participants went on to use illicit drugs, compared with 66 percent of participants.
- 80 percent of non-participants demonstrated antisocial behavior in later years, compared with 43 percent of participants.
The Good Behavior Game is played by having the teacher divide the class into heterogeneous teams of four to seven students. The teacher then posts rules that explain what is considered improper student behavior, such as verbal disruption or leaving one’s seat without permission. A team receives a checkmark whenever a member of the team displays inappropriate behavior. Teams win when the number of checkmarks does not exceed four by the end of the game. Initially, rewards for winning include receiving stickers for good behavior. As time progresses, winning teams receive extra privileges like a longer recess. The length of a game initially lasts 10 minutes and gradually increases until it spans an entire school day.
The Good Behavior Game is a classroom behavior management strategy that promotes each child’s positive behavior by rewarding student teams for complying with criteria set for appropriate behavior, such as working quietly, following directions or being polite to each other. The team-based approach uses peer encouragement to help children follow rules and learn how to be good students. At the same time, it enables teachers to build strong academic skills and positive behaviors.
More than two decades of randomized field trials in Baltimore show that using the Good Behavior Game in the first and second grades produces important outcomes in the short, medium and long-term for students with high levels of aggression in the first grade. The short-term gains include reducing classroom aggression while developing more on-task behavior. By middle school, those who played the Good Behavior Game in the first two years of elementary school were less likely to be delinquent and in need of mental health services than those not playing the game. At ages 19-21, those who played the game were far more likely to have attained a high school diploma and far less likely to have needed special educational services, to have been diagnosed with antisocial behavior or to have used illicit drugs, compared to those who did not play the game in the early elementary years.