Effects of a classroom management intervention on student selective attention: results from a randomized controlled trial

ABSTRACT

A main objective of classroom management (CM) is to raise students’ attention to their daily academic work by creating a classroom environment that supports academic and socioemotional learning. While studies have addressed CM effects on classroom-level behaviour or students’ academic outcomes, students’ attention skills been largely overlooked. This randomized controlled trial evaluates the effectiveness of a teacher-targeted CM intervention on students’ selective attention. Twenty-four primary schools were randomized into receiving the Inclusive And Appreciative Classroom Management (IACM) intervention (treatment) or a general information technology (IT) didactics course (control condition). All participating 1st-grade teachers and their students (N = 1,160) were followed for 1 year. Using repeated measurements of the d2 Test of Attention, we find that the IACM intervention improves students’ selective attention with .26 standard deviations. The effect is robust to the inclusion of student- and classroom-level characteristics. All analyses account for the variation across students, classrooms, and schools.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom management
• teacher-targeted intervention
• randomized controlled trial
• primary school students
• selective attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This paper reports effects solely on attention skills. Additional measures in the study include cognitive problem-solving skills (Hansen, Kreiner, & Hansen, 1999), emergent reading skills (Nielsen et al., 1997), and socioemotional strengths and difficulties (Goodman, 1997).

2. With three hierarchal levels (students, classes, schools), the model is data demanding. We therefore restrict the number of random effects. Estimating the model with more random effects does not alter the substantive conclusions about intervention effects.

3. These estimates are available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Danish Council for Strategic Research [09-070295].

Notes on contributors

Maria Keilow

Maria Keilow, MSc Sociology, is a PhD fellow at VIVE – The Danish Center for Social Science Research and Department of Public Health, Aarhus University. Her research interests are educational sociology, child wellbeing and mental health, ADHD, socioeconomic inequality in mental health, and classroom intervention studies concerning, for example, classroom management, inclusion, or student behaviour. Her work has been published in the journals Educational Research and PLoS ONE, among others.

Anders Holm

Anders Holm, PhD, is a Professor in Quantitative Sociology, employed at the Social Science Centre, at University of Western Ontario, Canada. His research interests are intergenerational mobility, econometric methods, classroom composition, school intervention studies, and school effectiveness research. His work has been published in Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Sociological Methods & Research, and Social Science & Medicine, among many others.

Mette Friis-Hansen

Mette Friis-Hansen, MA (Ed) in Educational Sociology, is a Senior Research Consultant at VIVE – The Danish Center for Social Science Research. She has managed and coordinated several data collections including surveys and student tests and has great experience with the project management of teacher- and classroom-targeted intervention studies and RCTs.

Rune Müller Kristensen

Rune Müller Kristensen, MA and PhD in Education is an Assistant Professor at the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University, Denmark. His research interests comprise classroom management, teacher-targeted interventions, teacher personality, and didactics. He has also contributed to several systematic reviews within educational research.