Consequence Choice and Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disabilities: Effects on Academic Engagement

Abstract

The difficulties students identified with emotional and behavior disabilities present sometimes strain inclusive educators. General education teachers often find themselves ill equipped to provide effective support for both students with and without disabilities. An effective intervention that may hold promise for included students with academic and behavior problems involves the use of choice; more specifically, consequence choice, which provides students with the ability to select their own reinforcement. The current study examined the effects of choice of reinforcement via a single-subject multielement design with baseline for four students with emotional disturbance or behavior disabilities educated in an inclusion setting. With an increase in task difficulty, the behavior of two students indicated a functional relation between engagement and choice and two additional students demonstrated a functional relation between the presence and absence of reinforcement. Students did not distinguish academic behavior across the course of the study. The difficulty level of the instructional material, as well as the perceived preference of the reinforcers may play a role in study outcomes. Future directions follow study limitations and implications for inclusion practitioners.