Self-Monitoring in Education Putting Individuals With \"Intellectual

Self-Monitoring in Education

Putting individuals with "intellectual disabilities" and "challenging behaviors" into regular classrooms is clearly a good idea - the educational literature supports this. But what happens once they are in the classroom? How does one then improve the social behavior and learning opportunities of these students? One idea, cooperative learning (also called peer tutoring), does show some promise; however, another idea based around the technique of self-monitoring/self-recording is specifically highlighted in the article under discussion. This method (which trains a student to identify, record and modify inappropriate behavior) was introduced to a certain thirteen-year-old girl named Pauline who had lived in a Romanian orphanage for ten years and had suffered "severe deprivation and abuse." The specific behaviors targeted in Pauline were stereotypic in quality (body-rocking and hand gazing) as well as consistent in quantity (they occurred consistently throughout the school day).

This "targeting" of behavior took the form of an intervention that was structured throughout a variety Pauline's academic classes: Gaelic, Religion and English. Her trainers first role-played stereotypic as well as on-task behavior so that Pauline could distinguish with a high degree of accuracy the difference between the two. Once this was accomplished, Pauline was instructed on how to identify these behaviors in her own behavior and then mark this down on paper. She received verbal praise and other positive reinforcement when she correctly did this. All of this was completed within the separate resource room, but eventually this procedure was transferred to an actual classroom setting.