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Well, here it goes... !

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TIER 1 interventions off Task - DISRUPTIVE

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TIER 1 interventions off Task - DISRUPTIVE

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TIER 1 interventions - OFF TASK but non-disruptive

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TIER 1 interventions - OFF TASK but non-disruptive

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PBISWorld.com Tier 1 Positive Behavior Interventions And Supports For Off Task, Non Disruptive

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PBISWorld.com Tier 1 Positive Behavior Interventions And Supports specifically to target and address Off Task, Non Disruptive

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Instructional Strategies for Social Studies

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Instructional Strategies for Social Studies

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INTERVENTION strat- LEARNING STATIONS IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES

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INTERVENTION strat- LEARNING STATIONS IN THE SOCIAL STUDIES

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-"Pupils need to proceed independently whenever possible, individually or within a committee. Time on task is important.The pupil makes decisions on sequential learning activities. He/she may choose the learning style preferred, be it individual endeavors or small group work. He/she accumulates knowledge and skills, making modifications as needed." ( (Ediger, 2011, para. 5)

*Using stations to increase time on task and depth of self-reflection. Since students are choosing stations of "interest" then focus would improve.

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INTERVENTIONS/modifications - General Education Teachers and Students With ADHD: What Modifications Are Made?

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INTERVENTIONS/modifications - General Education Teachers and Students With ADHD: What Modifications Are Made?

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-peer tutoring

-strategies instruction

-computer-assisted instruction

-teaching notetaking

**impulsivity and social skills - SELF_REGULATION includes: teaching problem solving techniques, self evaluation and self control.

-"Regarding behavioral modifications, three of the general educators in the four elementary schools we studied discussed providing opportunities for these students to move about the classroom. Two reported applying the rules more flexibly for children with ADHD. Again, our observations suggested that, although these modifications were used, they were not systematically implemented. (para. 5 of discussion)  (Nowacek & Mamlin, 2006)

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INTERVENTION -Effects of Response Cards on Disruptive Behavior and Academic Responding During Math Lessons by Fourth-Grade Urban Students

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INTERVENTION -Effects of Response Cards on Disruptive Behavior and Academic Responding During Math Lessons by Fourth-Grade Urban Students

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response card condition (whole group)

"Consistently over the last 20 years, teachers, especially those new to the field, have reported behavior problems as one of their greatest school-related concerns and challenges" (Billingsley, 2001; Billingsley & Tomchin, 1992; DarlingHammond, 2003; Fimian & Santoro, 1983; Muscott, 1987; Pullis, 1992; Veenman, 1984).

-"The use of response cards is one intervention with some preliminarily empirical evidence of decreasing offtask or disruptive behavior while increasing on-task behavior in the classroom. These responses occur in tandem with increased student responding and academic achievement compared to traditional whole-class lecture" (e.g., Armendariz & Umbreit, 1999; Christie & Schuster, 2003; Gardner et al., 1994).

(Lambert, Cartledge, & Heward, 2006)

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INTERVENTIONS-Teaching Social Studies to Middle School Students with Learning Problems

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INTERVENTIONS-Teaching Social Studies to Middle School Students with Learning Problems

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"Many of the interventions that help students with learning problems succeed in a middle school social studies class involve modifications in the instructional presentation." (para.10)

-advanced organizers

-high interest readings

-modified text

-Cooperative groups

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INcreasing on task performance for students with adhd

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INcreasing on task performance for students with adhd

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Increasing on task behavior through the development of classroom social skills

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Increasing on task behavior through the development of classroom social skills

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Teacher Interventions-To-Go Series

School-Wide Strategies for Managing...
OFF-TASK / INATTENTION

Students who have chronic difficulties paying attention in class face the risk of poor grades and even school failure. Inattention may be a symptom of an underlying condition such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. However, teachers should not overlook other possible explanations for student off-task behavior. It may be, for example, that a student who does not seem to be paying attention is actually mismatched to instruction (the work is too hard or too easy) or preoccupied by anxious thoughts. Or the student may be off-task because the teacher's lesson was poorly planned or presented in a disorganized manner. It is also important to remember that even children with ADHD are influenced by factors in their classroom setting and that these students' level of attention is at least partly determined by the learning environment. Teachers who focus on making their instruction orderly, predictable, and highly motivating find that they can generally hold the attention of most of their students most of the time. Here are some ideas to consider to boost rates of student attending and on-task behavior:

References

Brock, S.E.(1998, February). Helping the student with ADHD in the classroom Strategies for teachers. Communiqué, 26 (5), 18-20.

Carnine, D.W. (1976). Effects of two teacher presentation rates on off-task behavior, answering correctly, and participation. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 9, 199-206.

DuPaul, G.J., & Ervin, R.A. (1996). Functional assessment of behaviors related to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Linking assessment to intervention design. Behavior Therapy, 27, 601-622.

Ford, A. D., Olmi, D. J., Edwards, R. P., & Tingstrom, D. H. (2001). The sequential introduction of compliance training components with elementary-aged children in general education classroom settings. School Psychology Quarterly, 16, 142-157.

Gettinger, M. (1988). Methods of proactive classroom management. School Psychology Review, 17, 227-242.

Gettinger, M., & Seibert, J.K. (2002). Best practices in increasing academic learning time. In A. Thomas (Ed.), Best practices in school psychology IV: Volume I (4th ed., pp. 773-787). Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.

Heward, W.L. (1994). Three 'low-tech' strategies for increasing the frequency of active student response during group instruction. In R.Gardner III, D.M.Sainato, J.O.Cooper, T.E.Heron, W.L.Heward, J.Eshleman, & T.A.Grossi (Eds.), Behavior analysis in education: Focus on measurably superior instruction (pp. 283-320). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole.

Martens, B.K. & Kelly, S.Q. (1993). A behavioral analysis of effective teaching. School Psychology Quarterly, 8, 10-26.

Martens, B.K., & Meller, P.J. (1990). The application of behavioral principles to educational settings. In T.B. Gutkin & C.R.Reynolds (Eds.), The handbook of school psychology (2nd ed.) (pp. 612-634). New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Powell, S., & Nelson, B. (1997). Effects of choosing academic assignments on a student with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 30, 181-183.

U.S. Department of Education (2004). Teaching children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: Instructional strategies and practices. Retrieved August 20, 2005, from http://www.ed.gov/teachers/needs/speced/adhd/adhd-resource-pt2.doc

Copyright ©2018 Jim Wright

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From Jim Wright: Intervention Ideas for OFF-TASK / INATTENTION

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Teacher Interventions-To-Go Series School-Wide Strategies for Managing... OFF-TASK / INATTENTION Students who have chronic difficulties paying attention in class face the risk of poor grades and even school failure. Inattention may be a symptom of an underlying condition such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. However, teachers should not overlook other possible explanations for student off-task behavior.

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Free Educational Articles | Education.com

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Education and parenting articles offer expert tips and information on raising kids. Read educational articles, parenting articles, & more

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Educators who use effective classroom management techniques, employ good teaching practices and interactive learning activities have the power to turn on the learning lights.

Time-on-task, a significant unit in AFT's ER&D Foundations of Effective Teaching, has been one of the most widely discussed concepts among researchers, administrators, and educators since the 1970's.

This discussion actually began with John Carroll's 1963 paper, "A Model of School Learning", which directly linked learning to time. He proposed that true learning depends on the amount of time a student spends actively engaged in the learning process compared to the amount of time the student needs in order to learn. For example, if Bill needs 60 minutes to recognize and know ten new sight words or be able to type 25 words per minute with no errors, and he spends 30 minutes on the learning, then Bill will not master the material. Bill will learn half the words or type at half the speed and/or make errors.

Later research studies amplified this concept. These studies explored how time can be more efficiently used in classrooms and the instructional practices that lead to active student learning. The California Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study (BTES) of grades 2 through 5 in a large number of elementary schools identified teaching activities and classroom conditions that advanced student learning. BTES findings highlighted three important time concepts: allocated time, engaged time and academic learning time.

Allocated time is the total amount of time available for learning; e.g. the length of the school day or a class period. It is the "opportunity to learn". According to the BTES and many subsequent studies, teachers who allocate more time to a specific content area have students who achieve at higher levels than teachers who allocate less time to the same content. The Florida Department of Education (FLDOE) embraced this research concept when it developed the policy that mandated an uninterrupted 90 minute reading block for all public elementary schools. This standardized reading time allocation guarantees that all elementary students have an equal opportunity to learn to read. The BTES study also noted factors that limit learning or cause students to lose interest during the allocated timeframe, such as:

Unscheduled interruptions, public announcements, fire drills, visitors and other school management practices

Uneven transitions between activities and inefficient classroom management procedures that disrupt the learning flow, such as disorderly material distribution or disorganized assignment collection

Over-reliance on seatwork, uninteresting and overly demanding lessons and other non-engaging instructional practices

The BTES findings on engaged time or time on task demonstrate that the more engaged time students have, the higher they achieve. Highly interactive instructional styles led to greater amounts of student engaged time, and, consequently, increased student learning. The Time on Task unit in the ER&D Foundation course offers this data from the BTES study of reading and mathematic instruction:

Students were actively engaged in learning 84 percent of the time during teacher led activities but only 70 percent of the time during seatwork

Seatwork and students working alone was the dominant activity pattern in classrooms studied - 66% in reading and 75% in math

Student engagement dropped considerably lower when students spent 90% of their time doing seatwork

This research found its way into many, many teacher evaluation systems to promote teacher-student interaction and support student learning. Highly effective teachers use interactive presentations with modeling, questions and answers, guided practice, and constructive feedback before students work independently. It is also interesting to note that high student engagement during teacher-led instruction and group work yielded high engagement during independent seatwork.

Academic learning time has to do with quality; it is the amount of time students spend actively working on tasks of an appropriate difficulty. Success breeds success. When a teacher targets the instruction of a new concept or skill so students can succeed at least 75% of the time, students are more engaged and achieve at higher levels. Computer game makers use this same research concept. They create captivating games designed with advancing levels of difficulty so that even novice players, intrigued by the challenge, and can "find the ring" or "enter the magic door" frequently enough to maintain their interest. For the teacher, striking the balance between challenge and success in the classroom is more demanding and complex than any game, particularly with a heterogeneous group of students. To deliver lessons designed to maximize academic learning time, teachers must:

accurately diagnose each student's knowledge and skill level

prescribe learning tasks appropriate to a student's levels

structure engaging lessons around the learning tasks and give clear, concise task directions

have substantive teacher-student interaction during the lesson, such as: modeling, guiding students as they practice, asking probing questions, giving corrective feedback

How does the time-on task research play out in the day-to-day classroom experience? Along with school management practices that ensure quality classroom time, time on task depends on good classroom management processes and highly interactive teaching styles.

Four significant classroom management processes promote time-on-task:

Room arrangement - Well-organized room arrangements provide easy student movement and good teacher-student eye contact. Trouble-free traffic patterns reduce distractions and disruptions. In addition, educators whose rooms are arranged so they have a clear view of all their students can easily monitor student engagement and attend to student activities.

Rules and procedures - Effective rules and procedures reduce the time spent on disruptions and disciplinary situations

Transitions - Efficient practiced transitions help students move in and out of the room smoothly and get to work quickly at the beginning of class or on the next learning activity.

Preparation and pacing - Doing the hard work of pre-planning and preparing ample activities and materials allows educators to focus on the lesson momentum. Good pacing reduces dead time and keeps students involved and on task.

What are practical ways of using this information? In The Art and Science of Teaching, Robert Marzano identifies and explains four steps that work well in a variety of curriculum areas and classroom settings to promote time-on-task. They are:

Step 1: Explanation. Students require explanation for most curricular aims or learning goals. For example, if a teacher wants students to be able to perform oral presentations and assess their own skills, then the students need to be able use an evaluation rubric containing four criteria. The teacher would explain-perhaps in lecture format-the meaning of the rubric's four factors and how to apply those factors to assess a presentation.

Step 2: Modeling. It's often helpful for students to see "what it would look like" to actually have mastered the learning goal. It is very helpful for students to see someone (not necessarily the teacher) model the successful use of the skill or knowledge.

Step 3: Guided practice. Demanding learning goals require assistance and practice. Teachers need to include a number of instructional activities for students to practice with improvement-oriented guidance and feedback.

Step 4: Independent practice. At this point students are to display genuine mastery of the learning goal. Engaged time-on-task is especially relevant here. Independent practice makes sure that students can apply the knowledge or skill in a variety of circumstances and is deeply understood.

Innovative educators use many interactive strategies during the first three steps and particularly during guided practice. Here is an annotated list of well-recognized, interactive teaching strategies:

Limit lecture time to 15-20 minutes and give students two or three opportunities within the lecture period to answer questions or Think/Pair/Share (see below)

Use small group work (cooperative learning groups) to learn new information and model, practice or review a learning goal

Employ a variety of interactive methods during a lesson; including:

Think/Pair/Share - Think about what you heard/learned, turn to a neighbor and share your thoughts in a very short time period

Buzz Session - give small groups a specific problem to solve in a short time period, monitor their work together and ask them to report their findings

Case Study - provide small groups with an open-ended situation that requires analysis, discussion and conclusions/recommendation(s) then groups deliver oral or written report

Incident Process - give small groups a real life incident or problem and ask the group to discuss it and develop a solution

Question & Answer Period -

following a brief topic introduction and before a lecture, ask students to write their questions on index cards and collect cards before the lecture, then during the lecture read and answer the student-generated questions

have a random method of selecting the student to answer questions, e.g. names written on popsicle sticks or index cards drawn out of a bin, computer selected students, previous responder selects next student

ask open-ended, critical thinking questions that require thought, analysis, evaluation with justification or synthesis

ask rapid-fire close-ended (single answer) questions

Short writing exercises - have students write a short response that identifies the part(s) of the lesson they did not understand or gives the key points of the lesson

Note Review - ask students to review their notes and star the parts of the lesson they understand completely and circle the points that don't make sense; circle the room to answer questions and identify consistent misconceptions

Demonstration - provide teacher-led or student-developed visual presentations of important concepts

Other interactive possibilities:

Peer instruction

Practice sessions

Discussion

Role play

Brainstorming

Games

Field Trips

Competition

Assigned reading

In conclusion, time is important for learning. Across decades of research, time-on-task is positively associated with academic achievement. Students who are active participants in their knowledge acquisition and skill development own their learning and will perform at high levels of accomplishment. Educators who are familiar with the time-on-task research, know their students well, use effective classroom management techniques, and employ good teaching practices and interactive learning activities have the power grid to turn the learning lights on for many, many students.
References:
AFT Educational Research and Dissemination, Foundations in Effective Teaching I

ARMA International, "Interactive Teaching", www.arma.org/learningcenter/facilitator/uploads/interactiveteaching.ppt
or Interactive Teaching (PDF)

ASCD Express 4.20, "Identifying (and Engaging Students in) Time-on-Task Activities"

Resources:

Finding Enough Time in the School Day
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/pdfdocs/engagedTime.PDF
Off Task/Inattention
http://www.jimwrightonline.com/php/interventionista/interventionista_intv_list.php?prob_type=off_task__inattention
Real World Teacher
http://www.classroomdiscipline101.com/classroom-management/page/4/
10 Guaranteed Methods of Keeping Students on Task
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/814745/10_guaranteed_methods_of_keeping_a.html?singlepage=true&cat=4
Time-on-Task Overview with Self-Evaluation Tools
http://www.usu.edu/teachall/text/effective/research/time.pdf
How Do You Manage Your Time?
http://classroom-organization.suite101.com/article.cfm/time_management_for_teachers

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Time-on-Task: A Teaching Strategy that Accelerates Learning

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Time-on-task, a significant unit in AFT's ER&D Foundations of Effective Teaching, has been one of the most widely discussed concepts among researchers, administrators, and educators since the 1970's. This discussion actually began with John Carroll's 1963 paper, "A Model of School Learning", which directly linked learning to time.

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Tier 2 intervention plan for social studies

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Tier 2 intervention plan for social studies

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Index of Strategies for Teaching Social Studies

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End of Cluster Expectations | Social Studies Literature | Field Trips | Professional Development Opportunities | Internet Resources Articles | DSSEP Home Page | DCTE Home Page | Join Our Listserv | Social Studies/Reading Workshops | Key Delaware Benchmark Terms | Strategies for Teaching Social Studies

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No Child left Untableted - increase learning/focus and interest

"K-12 isn't working," he said, "and we have to change the way we do it." Citing global assessments that rank the United States well behind the leading countries in reading and math, he said: "Between 1970 and 2010 we doubled the amount of money we spent on education and the number of adults in the schools, but the results are just not there. Any system that poured in as much money as we did and made as little progress has a real problem. We keep trying to fix it by doing the same thing, only a little different and better. This is about a lot different and better." (Rotella, September 2013, p. para. 8)

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Addition of use of technology in social studies

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Addition of use of technology in social studies

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Technology integration – including students who would otherwise not orally share.  Utilizing technology allows students to electronically give input without hesitation.  Although it does not replace conversation.  This is another strategy to increase time on task in social studies..

“The typical dilemma with group discussions, agrees Maiuri, is getting everyone to participate--including shy kids. Holding the online discussions gets rid of those concerns, she says: "It doesn't mean I've given up on oral discussion. But with this, every kid can respond at once. They write their thoughts, they respond to other kids--it's exactly what I want in oral discussions, but can't get."

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Abstract

A successful learning environment can be characterized by actively engaged students displaying appropriate student behavior. We implemented a group contingency intervention as a novel component to a school-wide behavior management system to decrease the frequency of inappropriate behaviors and, conversely, increase the academic engagement of students in four elementary school classrooms. Twelve students with behavioral risks served as target students to monitor effects. A reversal design was implemented to evaluate behaviors across experimental conditions. Results indicated that the frequency of inappropriate behaviors decreased and academic engaged time increased for all 12 participants. These results suggested that the group contingency was an effective class-wide intervention. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Descriptors: Independent group contingency, interdependent group contingency, lottery-based reward, school-wide behavior management

Group contingency procedures have become increasingly popular in educational settings to manage the classroom behavior of large groups of students ( Hansen & Lignugaris/Kraft, 2005). Two types of contingencies commonly used in school settings are independent and interdependent group contingencies. With independent group contingencies, all children in the class or school receive the same consequence (e.g., privileges, rewards, punishment) for exhibiting pre-determined behaviors (e.g., Brigham, Bakken, Scruggs, & Mastropieri, 1992). With interdependent group contingencies, no individual student receives the reward unless all students in a group or across the school contribute to meeting the specific reinforcement criterion (e.g., Theodore, Bray, Kehle, & Jenson, 2001).

Group contingency interventions may be particularly beneficial for use in classrooms because they (a) increase the probability of teacher attention to appropriate behavior, (b) are more efficient to implement than individualized treatments, and (c) increase the likelihood that any single student's behavior will be exposed to the reinforcement contingency ( Cashwell, Skinner, & Smith, 2001; Embry, 2002; Skinner, Skinner, & Cashwell, 1999; Sugai & Horner, 2002).

Studies have shown group contingencies to decrease inappropriate behavior and increase prosocial behavior in general and special education classrooms ( Stage & Quiroz, 1997) and, in some instances, to improve school-wide indicators of success ( Scott, 2001; Sugai & Horner, 2002). Procedures that have been shown to be effective within the context of group contingencies include visual cuing systems, public posting, social praise, team points, self- and group-evaluation, and group and individual reinforcement systems ( Babyak, Luze, & Kamps, 2000; Salend, Whittaker, & Reeder, 1992).

Despite the efficacy of reward-based group contingency interventions for teaching appropriate behavior ( Scott, 2001), class-wide and school-wide behavior management programs more commonly focus on reducing inappropriate behavior through the application of punishment procedures, such as warning systems and zero tolerance policies ( Cashwell, et al., 2001; Colvin, Kameenui, Sugai, 1993; Sugai & Horner, 2002). In fact, some authors have reported that school staff may be less likely to implement a reinforcement component because of the expense, time, or objection to using tangible rewards ( Kelshaw-Levering, Sterling-Turner, Henry, & Skinner, 2000).

Based on these findings, we were interested in evaluating a low-cost, reward-based group contingency program that targeted appropriate behavior. Ideally, the program would be effective for large numbers of students to minimize the need for individualized programs, which are time consuming, costly, and difficult to implement in large classrooms. To increase the acceptability of the program, we embedded the intervention into an existing school-wide behavior management system. To reduce the cost and time required to implement the reward component, we instituted a lottery system in conjunction with independent and interdependent group contingencies and taught students to self-manage. As such, this study was designed to build upon the empirical literature on group contingency procedures by (a) incorporating the group contingency within a previously established school-wide management system (a warning system), (b) instituting a lottery system in conjunction with an independent group contingency, and (c) including a self-management component to further decrease the time and costs associated with the intervention.

Method

Participants and Settings

Three children in each of four classrooms were enrolled in the study, for a total of 12 participants. The children (9 males and 3 females) were between the ages of 7 years and 9 years. They were chosen based on requests from their teachers for assistance due to problem behaviors. All of the children were concurrently participating in an assessment project through a university research facility and were considered at risk for developing severe behavior disorders based on teacher ratings on the Systematic Screening for Behavior Disorders Checklist ( SSBD) ( Walker & Severson, 1992). Four of the students were diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, one student was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, and one was diagnosed with a learning disability.

The four participating classrooms included two third-grade classes (Class 1 and Class 2) and two second-grade classes (Class 3 and Class 4), all located in a school in a suburban community of a Midwestern city. Each class had approximately 18 to 20 students. The percentage of minority students was 48%, with 60% of students eligible for free or reduced lunches. The teachers had15 years to 30 years of classroom experience. At the time of the study, each classroom was implementing a school-wide behavioral management program consisting of a warning system that targeted inappropriate behavior. Consequences included loss of recess time and home notes.

Materials

Materials included a wall chart with pockets containing each student's name and colored cards, desktop self-management charts, lottery tickets and rewards, warning cards, and consequence cards. The materials in use for the school-wide behavioral management system at the time of the study included the wall chart and color cards (called "flip cards"), which were provided by the school at no cost to the teacher. To implement the intervention, teachers used small lottery cards (5.1 cm x 5.1 cm) for distribution to students for appropriate behavior. The lottery cards included a space for the student to write his or her name. Each student was given a 10.2 cm x 15.2 cm self-management chart to tape on the top of his or her desk. The 27 spaces on the chart were used to record the number of lottery tickets they had received. Rewards such as pencils, erasers, small notebooks, stickers, and shoelaces were provided by a researcher for the lottery drawing. In addition to lottery incentives, occasional pizza and donut parties were also provided by the researcher. Teachers also used warning cards during the intervention, which were distributed for inappropriate behavior at the same time the lottery cards were given out for appropriate behaviors. Warning cards were 7.6 cm x 7.6 cm and had spaces on the back for student name, parent signature, and to note loss of recess. Costs for the rewards were approximately $150 for the study duration. The remaining materials (i.e., lottery tickets, warning cards, self-management charts) were created using standard paper stock, with costs under $50.

Response Measurement

Research Design

A reversal design ( Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968) was used to study the effects of the group contingency intervention. Experimental conditions were ABABC, where A = baseline, B = treatment, and C = fading of treatment (maintenance).

Baseline

The teachers implemented the pre-existing behavior management procedures (e.g., school-wide warning system, loss of recess, home notes) during baseline. The school-wide warning system consisted of colored cards used as a visual representation of each individual student's behavior throughout the day. The consequences for inappropriate behaviors incorporated in the "color card system" were as follows: green = good student behavior; yellow = student has had a warning due to inappropriate behavior; red = student has had a 2 nd warning and 5 min off of his/her recess time; blue = student has had repeated warnings, lost all recess time and a note is sent to parent(s) noting the behavioral problems. Office referrals were frequently used for disruptions. The students were asked to "flip his/her card" when given a reprimand for inappropriate behavior.

Intervention

The components of the intervention included a classroom lottery game, interdependent group contingency, self-management, and individual warning cards. A reward-based lottery game was combined with the existing school-wide warning system described previously. All students (the participants and the other students in the class) received lottery tickets for maintaining appropriate behavior (i.e., having a green card or yellow card showing on the school-wide colored card system) and recorded the number of lottery tickets earned on a self-management chart by placing an "X" in a box for each ticket received. The group contingency lottery game (i.e., teacher distributing and drawing of winning lottery tickets simultaneously) was designed to occur twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Teachers were instructed to randomize the times that they awarded the lottery tickets to avoid any behavioral patterns (e.g., tickets always being awarded before recess) and to increase required appropriate student behaviors for longer durations of time. Teachers were instructed to include a verbal praise statement to the student(s) as they were awarding the lottery tickets. The teacher drew four or five winning lottery tickets right after distribution twice a day; students with the winning tickets could choose a small reward (e.g., pencils, stickers). An interdependent group contingency also was included in the intervention. The entire class received a pizza party as soon as each student had received enough lottery tickets to fill his or her self-management chart (27). The parties occurred approximately once per month.

Finally, individual warning cards were used in conjunction with the color cards and verbal warnings for inappropriate behavior. Any student on the color yellow, red or blue in the flip card system was given a warning card, and he or she was required to follow the steps on the warning card for each color change on the flip card system due to inappropriate behavior. The sequence was green = good behavior and student participates in lottery; yellow = inappropriate behavior, student given a warning card and required to sign the back but still able to participate in the lottery; red = warning, 5 min off recess, and parent signature required on the warning card; blue = warning, parent signature required on the card, and loss of all recess time. The warning cards were distributed at the same time as the lottery tickets.

Just as the parents were informed of the inappropriate behaviors via the warning card, it was suggested to the teachers that they incorporate a short note home telling the parents that their children had good behavior that week. Teachers were also required to submit their colored card records for each student at the end of each semester to the school.

Training and Implementation of the Intervention

The intervention was implemented in several steps. First, an initial meeting was held between the teacher and researcher to discuss the implementation of the intervention (approximately 60 min). This was followed by an initial meeting with the entire class to discuss the new intervention (approximately 30 min). During the explanation of the lottery game to the class, the researcher explained that they were chosen to do a game that would require them to show others what it is to be a good student. It was explained that their teacher would be passing out lottery tickets, which were contingent upon their colored card status. The student self-management charts and warning cards were also described. It was also explained that when each student in the class turned at least one chart in to the teacher, there would be a class party; that each new day began a new day of the lottery (i.e., prior tickets discarded); and individual student cards began on green. Training regarding appropriate behaviors occurred for approximately 15 min and consisted of modeling by the researcher and student role plays of 'incorrect' and 'correct' behavior.

After the training, the teachers took the lead role in distributing the lottery tickets and warning cards and conducting the lottery drawings. These activities required 10 min of the teacher's time, twice per day. The researcher provided feedback to the teachers on their praise rates and their students' progress. During the game, the researcher frequently provided feedback to the entire group on their progress and/or clarified expectations. Typically, the classes were given bonus lottery tickets for their efforts and occasionally rewarded with small candies or prizes (e.g., pencils). The researcher also provided assistance in writing weekly positive home notes for the students.

Fading the Intervention

Eventually, the lottery drawing was faded to once per day, but varied with respect to the time of day (e.g., not always at the end of the day). Lottery tickets were still awarded twice each day to the students for good behavior. Teachers were asked to continue the use of verbal praise for appropriate student behaviors during the entire day. Teachers incorporated the lottery ticket totals and chart completions into the individual student progress notebooks, which were shown to parents at conference times.

Individual Motivational System

During the 2 nd week of the group intervention, an individual motivational system was implemented for Participant 4 consisting of (a) teacher feedback at the end of each activity, (b) individual rewards for performance, and (c) a home-school note of daily performance. This individual program was implemented because the student's academic engagement time was not increasing and disruptive behavior remained high, suggesting that the student needed more individualized behavior support. It was implemented during the entire day and included the teacher's signature or stamp on a behavior chart for each activity completed (e.g., reading, math, computer time) during which the child maintained appropriate behaviors. The stamps were given at the end of the activity and put on a record sheet that was sent home and signed by the parent. The participant earned a bonus lottery ticket if he maintained good behavior during four of the five daily activities.

Results

Overall, results demonstrated that the intervention improved student behaviors in all four classrooms. As shown in , , , and , all but 1 of the 12 participant showed substantial increases in academic engagement and decreases in inappropriate behavior during the intervention. Participant 4 showed improvements in both behaviors when the individual motivational system was combined with the intervention. Experimental control was clearly demonstrated for most participants through a reversal and replication of the effect. The effects maintained for all participants when the lottery drawing was faded to once per day. The students also showed improvements when the SSBD was re-administered in the spring. Ten of the 12 students were shown as 'not at-risk' on the Maladaptive Behaviors Scale of the SSBD (compared to seven in the fall); and nine of the participants had decreasing scores from fall to spring. Eleven students remained at normative levels on the Adaptive Behavior Scale of the SSBD.

All teachers increased group praise statements slightly during the 15-min data session from a mean of 1 response per min [rpm] during baseline to a mean of 3 rpm during the intervention. Each of the four teachers also increased praise statements directed to individuals from a mean of 0 rpm in baseline to a mean of 1 rpm during intervention. This outcome was replicated during the reversal to baseline and reintroduction of the intervention.

Finally, a majority of students, a total of 85, responded to the student satisfaction questionnaire at the end of the study. Overall, students rated the group contingency lottery game positively. When asked, "How much did you like to play the group contingency lottery game?", the majority of students (86%) responded "Very much." Eighty-six percent of students responded that the lottery game helped them have good student behavior "Quite a bit" or "Very much," 85% of students responded that the game helped them stay on task "Quite a bit" or "Very much," and 85% reported they wanted to play the lottery game in the future. Satisfaction data collected from the teachers at the end of the study indicated that the teachers "Agreed" or "Strongly Agreed" that the group contingency lottery game fit into their daily routine, was easy for them to learn how to use, and was easy for them to teach their students how to play. The teachers "Agreed" or "Strongly Agreed" that the group contingency lottery game helped their students to have appropriate behavior, be more productive, and stay on task. All teachers agreed or strongly agreed that "their students seemed to enjoy the playing the group contingency lottery game" and "they would recommend that other teachers use the group contingency lottery game in their classrooms." Three teachers responded that they planned on using the lottery game "Frequently" or "Occasionally" in the future.

Conclusions

This study provided an example of a group contingency intervention in four classrooms. The results showed that an intervention consisting of a reward-based independent group contingency and lottery, interdependent group contingency (class parties), and self-management was effective for 2 nd and 3 rd grade children and target students who were at risk for severe behavior disorders. These components, embedded within the existing school-wide punitive-only behavior management program, were intended to increase the feasibility and acceptability of using rewards in the classroom. Results of the satisfaction surveys indicated that the teachers and students were pleased with the intervention. In fact, the teachers requested the intervention data be used in addition to progress reports during parent conferences.

These findings are consistent with other research showing the effectiveness of group contingency interventions to increase engagement ( Babyak et al., 2000) and decrease problem behaviors ( Hansen & Lignugaris/Kraft, 2005). For all 12 at-risk children, the frequency of inappropriate behaviors decreased and no longer interfered with their classroom performance. Further support was also demonstrated for combining self-management with group contingencies ( Kern, Dunlap, Childs, & Cook, 1994).

In spite of overall student and class improvement, one student (Participant 4) required an individualized intervention. He continued to be disruptive during the class-wide intervention, and removal from the classroom was occurring several times per week. However, the individual motivational system rapidly improved the effectiveness of the group contingency program. Several other limitations of this study must be considered. First, no data were collected on the integrity with which the teachers implemented the intervention. Second, the component(s) of the intervention that were responsible for the outcome is unclear because multiple components were introduced simultaneously (lottery drawings, self-management). Finally, interobserver agreement was assessed using a relatively imprecise calculation method (whole session).

Recommendations for Practitioners

We highly recommend a class-level group contingency to support school-wide behavior management systems. The contingency should focus the teacher's attention on appropriate behavior and use tangible rewards that could potentially reinforce student task engagement. The practicality of the intervention in this study allowed the teacher to focus on instruction and provided the students with a learning environment that was engaging and positive.

We recommend including both independent (i.e., individual consequences) and interdependence (e.g., consequences based on the entire group) components. The interdependent criteria for earning the class party appeared to increase cooperation and encouragement of students to their peers to do well.

We also highly recommend the use of lottery tickets as an added component to delivery of rewards. Giving small prizes to four or five students rather than the whole class saved money and time. Use of the lottery drawing twice per day during natural breaks was easy to do and resulted in improvements for 11 of 12 students. This was easily faded to once per day, making the procedure even more efficient. The desk charts used for self-management appeared to assist with student motivation and were a simple way to track lottery tickets so the teachers knew when students had earned a class party.

Finally, we encourage the use of positive notes home as a feature of the class-wide group contingency. Teacher praise didn't change very much during intervention. As such, we would suggest using additional strategies to increase verbal attention to appropriate behavior (e.g., having teachers self-manage, teaching students to recruit praise, prompting teachers via a timer to deliver praise intermittently).

References

Baer D.M, Wolf M.M, Risley T.R. Some current dimensions of applied behavior analysis. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. 1968;1:91-97. [PMC free article]

Embry D.D. The Good Behavior Game: A best practice candidate as a universal behavioral vaccine. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review. 2002;5:273-297.

Salend S.J, Whittaker C.R, Reeder E. Group evaluation: A collaborative, peer-mediated behavior management system. Exceptional Children. 1992;59:203-209.

Walker H.M, Severson H.H. Systematic screening for behavior disorders (SSBD): User's guide and technical manual. Longmont, CO: Sopris West; 1992.

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The Effects of a Group Contingency Intervention on Academic Engagement and Problem Behavior of At-Risk Students

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A successful learning environment can be characterized by actively engaged students displaying appropriate student behavior. We implemented a group contingency intervention as a novel component to a school-wide behavior management system to decrease the frequency of inappropriate behaviors and, conversely, increase the academic engagement of students in four elementary school classrooms. Twelve students with behavioral risks served as target students to monitor effects.

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101 ADHD Interventions for the Elementary School Classroom Teacher

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101 ADHD Interventions for the Elementary School Classroom Teacher - Free download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read online for free.

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Teaching in international schools is an adventure. From landing that first job and getting off the plane in your new home to discovering new ways of life and new educational opportunities, there is excitement around every corner.

Meet our bloggers who each shed light on different aspects of the international school environment:

FORREST BROMAN has been in international education for 30 years. He has interviewed thousands of candidates, written a guide for international recruiters, and is the founder and President of The International Educator (TIE). He shares thoughts and tips on getting and securing a job in an international school.

BAMBI BETTS is the Director of the Principals' Training Center for International School Leadership and co-trainer for the PTC's Essential Skills courses. Bambi is also the CEO of the Academy for International School Heads (AISH). Having worked at international schools across the globe and a consultant to many more, she shares thoughts and insights on a wide range of topics in education.

STEPHEN DEXTER, a native of New England, has been a teacher and administrator since 1994. He finally discovered that the Swiss stay thin on a diet of chocolate, cheese and wine by walking a lot and not eating or drinking to excess. He is currently taking a gap year in the Swiss Alps to rediscover his passion for education and to understand what chief innovation officers really do.

DANIEL KERR is now Lower School Director at the American School of Paris. He previously served as Intermediate Division Principal at Academia Cotopaxi American International School in Quito, Ecuador, and prior to that was the Middle School Principal at SCIS in Shanghai, China. Dan has also worked at JIS in Jakarta, Indonesia and he began his International career in Abu Dhabi. Dan is thrilled to be joining the ASP family and will be accompanied by his wife, Jocelyn, who will be working as a counselor, and his two children, Max and Gabby.

KASSI COWLES is an IB English and TOK teacher currently based in Shanghai. She has worked in international education for the last 8 years in Canada, Togo and China. Her writing explores issues of educational reform and how to create authentic and creative learning communities.

MATTHEW GOOD & NIAMH CONWAY are international school teachers who met while working at the British School of Lome, in Togo, West Africa. They later moved to Uzbekistan, where they spent four years at Tashkent International School, each summer exploring another slice of the world by bike. Their Pedalgogy website allows users to follow the touring teachers on their two-year bike trip around the world.

BARRY DEQUANNE is currently working as the Head of School at the American School of Brasilia. His blog explores topics in K-12 education and school leadership within the framework of five focus areas: Academics, Activities, Arts, Leadership, and Service. The blog also explores professional articles and highlights recently read books.

EMILY MEADOWS Emily Meadows is an alumni of international schools and has worked as a professional educator and counselor across the world, serving children and families in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. She holds master's degrees in the fields of Counseling and Sexual Health, and is a current Doctor of Philosophy student in Comparative and International Education, researching LGBTQ+ inclusive policy and practice.

DAVID PENBERG is an urban and international educational leader/consultant with a deep commitment to progressive education, understanding global mindedness, and new school creation. He abides by the dictum of E.E. Cummings who said: " I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing, than teach ten thousand stars not to dance." He is presently the Head of School of Innovate Manhattan Charter School in New York City.

SHANNON FEHSE Shannon Fehse has spent her entire teaching career overseas, having lived and worked in China, Mexico, Colombia, Taiwan, and presently, the UAE. As a textbook definition extrovert, she talks to anyone, and enjoys listening to stories and different perspectives on life. Shannon has a somewhat faulty filter and often says what other people are thinking, but this typically works out favorably. She offers opinions and insight into the benefits and challenges of job hunting, dating overseas, and general issues that affect international educators.

GREGORY HEDGER Dr. Gregory Hedger has recently been appointed to be the head of the International School Yangon, in Myanmar, beginning in fall 2016. A native of Minnesota, Greg has served in education for over 25 years, including 13 years in the role of School Director at Cayman International School, Qatar Academy, and most recently as Superintendent at Escuela Campo Alegre in Venezuela. Greg promotes international education through his service on the boards of AAIE, AASSA, and his work with the International Task Force for Child Protection, his contributions to various periodicals, and his work to promote the next generation of leaders through workshops and teaching.

NICHOLAS ALCHIN Nicholas Alchin is High School Principal at the United World College of SE Asia, East Campus. A sino-celtic Brit who has lived and taught in the UK, Switzerland, Kenya, and Singapore, he has also held a number of roles with the IB and writes and speaks widely on educational matters. He enjoys traveling with wife Ellie, and kids Tom (10), Millie (13) and Ruth (16).

TONY DEPRATO Tony DePrato has a Master's Degree in Educational Technology from Pepperdine University and has been working as a Director of Educational Technology since 2009. He has worked in the United Arab Emirates and China where he has consulted with schools in both regions on various technology topics. In 2013, Tony DePrato released The BYOD Playbook a free guide for schools looking to discuss or plan a Bring Your Own Device program. Tony is originally from the US, and worked in multimedia, website development, and freelance video production. Tony is married to Kendra Perkins, who is a librarian.

ETTIE ZILBER is a consultant to International School Communities and Families in Transition and a veteran international school educator and school leader. She has served in independent international schools in Israel, Singapore, Spain, Guatemala, China, and most recently in the USA. Her expertise extends to such topics as international school models, second/foreign language acquisition, communicating between diverse groups, the impact of international mobility and relocation on children, parents and staff, the special family experience of the educators' children, the orientation of newcomers, multi-cultural communities, catalysts for teaching internationally, and marketing of international schools. She is the author of Third Culture Kids: The Children of International School Educators. She can be contacted at ettie.zilber@gmail.com

TRAE HOLLAND is the Director of Academia Cotopaxi's The ONE Institute, has been a leader in both the non-profit and business sectors, and has 19 years experience teaching both in the US and in international schools, with a specialization in learning differentiation. You can reach his website at www.traeholland.com.

JOHN MIKTON currently is the Head of Education and Media Technology/ Assistant Principal at the International School of Luxembourg. Previously he was the Director of eLearning at the Inter Community School Zurich, Switzerland and the Director of Information Technology at the International School of Prague, Czech Republic. John is an Apple Distinguished Educator, Google Trainer, Principal Training Centerfacilitator, Appseventssummit speaker and Learning 2.0Community Coach. John blogs @ https://beyonddigital.org

FREDERIC BORDAGUIBEL-LABAYLE is the High School Associate Principal and IB Diploma Coordinator at Academia Cotopaxi American International School in Quito, Ecuador. Fred was born and raised in the South West of France; he finished his studies and started teaching in the UK, then went on to Istanbul and he is currently in Quito. Fred likes to pause, reflect and share his experience as an international educator and administrator.

SUE EASTON is the Director of the Teacher Training Center. She has worked with international schools for the past eleven years, on four continents, in roles focused on enhancing teaching and learning practices. This experience has made her passionate about the topic of change and how to best make change to support students and student learning. Her blog will explore this topic through the lens of PTC, TTC and CTC trainers' words of wisdom.

ERIC & JAMIE are long time international school teachers and have had countless adventures around the globe working at different schools. Hear stories on travel, lifestyle, moving, and life in general as an international school teacher. They are a great resource for finding out what it is like to go from culture to culture, learning, and of course... teaching!

ALLI POIROT is currently teaching IB History, Modern World History, and Psychology at Asociación Escuelas Lincoln in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She taught previously at King's Academy in Madaba, Jordan, and at public and charter schools in and around Boston, Massachusetts. She has a deep interest in progressive pedagogy and believes in fostering student autonomy and empowerment.
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The International Educator (TIE) is a non-profit organization committed to matching the best educators with the best international schools around the world.

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Teaching in international schools is an adventure. From landing that first job and getting off the plane in your new home to discovering new ways of life and new educational opportunities, there is excitement around every corner. Meet our bloggers who each shed light on different aspects of the international school environment: FORREST BROMAN has been in international education for 30 years.

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I PLAN TO STUDY INTERVENTIONS TO INCREASE TIME ON TASK IN SOCIAL STUDIES...

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I PLAN TO STUDY INTERVENTIONS TO INCREASE TIME ON TASK IN SOCIAL STUDIES...

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TOPIC

Using brain breaks?? How to document improvement??

WHAT IS THE BEST INTERVENTION TO STUDY USE??

Brain breaks (attention breaks)

VOCABULARY INSTRUCTION/FOCUS

RESPONSE CARDS TO decrease disruptive behavior

COOPERATIVE GROUPS

HIGH INTEREST READINGS

USE OF TECHNOLOGY??? (computer assisted instruction)

LEARNING STATIONS (opportunity for CHOICE)

**PAY ATTENTION TO ON TASK STUDENTS

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Every now and then during the workweek-usually around three in the afternoon-a familiar ache begins to saturate my forehead and pool in my temples. The glare of my computer screen appears to suddenly intensify. My eyes trace the contour of the same sentence two or three times, yet I fail to extract its meaning. Even if I began the day undaunted, getting through my ever growing list of stories to write and edit, e-mails to send and respond to, and documents to read now seems as futile as scaling a mountain that continuously thrusts new stone skyward. There is so much more to do-so much work I genuinely enjoy-but my brain is telling me to stop. It's full. It needs some downtime.

Freelance writer and meditation teacher Michael Taft has experienced his own version of cerebral congestion. "In a normal working day in modern America, there's a sense of so much coming at you at once, so much to process that you just can't deal with it all," Taft says. In 2011, while finalizing plans to move from Los Angeles to San Francisco, he decided to take an especially long recess from work and the usual frenzy of life. After selling his home and packing all his belongings in storage, he traveled to the small rural community of Barre, Mass., about 100 kilometers west of Boston, where every year people congregate for a three-month-long "meditation marathon."

Taft had been on similar retreats before, but never one this long. For 92 days he lived at Insight Meditation Society's Forest Refuge facility, never speaking a word to anyone else. He spent most of his time meditating, practicing yoga and walking through fields and along trails in surrounding farmland and woods, where he encountered rafters of turkeys leaping from branches, and once spotted an otter gamboling in a swamp. Gradually, his mind seemed to sort through a backlog of unprocessed data and to empty itself of accumulated concerns. "When you go on a long retreat like that there's a kind of base level of mental tension and busyness that totally evaporates," Taft says. "I call that my 'mind being not full.' Currently, the speed of life doesn't allow enough interstitial time for things to just kind of settle down."

Many people in the U.S. and other industrialized countries would wholeheartedly agree with Taft's sentiments, even if they are not as committed to meditation. A 2010 LexisNexis survey of 1,700 white collar workers in the U.S., China, South Africa, the U.K. and Australia revealed that on average employees spend more than half their workdays receiving and managing information rather than using it to do their jobs; half of the surveyed workers also confessed that they were reaching a breaking point after which they would not be able to accommodate the deluge of data. In contrast to the European Union, which mandates 20 days of paid vacation, the U.S. has no federal laws guaranteeing paid time off, sick leave or even breaks for national holidays. In the Netherlands 26 days of vacation in a given year is typical. In America, Canada, Japan and Hong Kong workers average 10 days off each year. Yet a survey by Harris Interactive found that, at the end of 2012, Americans had an average of nine unused vacation days. And in several surveys Americans have admited that they obsessively check and respond to e-mails from their colleagues or feel obliged to get some work done in between kayaking around the coast of Kauai and learning to pronounce humuhumunukunukuapua'a.

To summarize, Americans and their brains are preoccupied with work much of the time. Throughout history people have intuited that such puritanical devotion to perpetual busyness does not in fact translate to greater productivity and is not particularly healthy. What if the brain requires substantial downtime to remain industrious and generate its most innovative ideas? "Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets," essayist Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times. "The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration-it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done."

In making an argument for the necessity of mental downtime, we can now add an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence to intuition and anecdote. Why giving our brains a break now and then is so important has become increasingly clear in a diverse collection of new studies investigating: the habits of office workers and the daily routines of extraordinary musicians and athletes; the benefits of vacation, meditation and time spent in parks, gardens and other peaceful outdoor spaces; and how napping, unwinding while awake and perhaps the mere act of blinking can sharpen the mind. What research to date also clarifies, however, is that even when we are relaxing or daydreaming, the brain does not really slow down or stop working. Rather-just as a dazzling array of molecular, genetic and physiological processes occur primarily or even exclusively when we sleep at night-many important mental processes seem to require what we call downtime and other forms of rest during the day. Downtime replenishes the brain's stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity, and is essential to both achieve our highest levels of performance and simply form stable memories in everyday life. A wandering mind unsticks us in time so that we can learn from the past and plan for the future. Moments of respite may even be necessary to keep one's moral compass in working order and maintain a sense of self.

The rest is history
For much of the 20th century many scientists regarded the idea that the brain might be productive during downtime as ludicrous. German neurologist Hans Berger disagreed. In 1929, after extensive studies using an electroencephalogram-a device he invented to record electrical impulses in the brain by placing a net of electrodes on the scalp-he proposed that the brain is always in "a state of considerable activity," even when people were sleeping or relaxing. Although his peers acknowledged that some parts of the the brain and spinal cord must work nonstop to regulate the lungs and heart, they assumed that when someone was not focusing on a specific mental task, the brain was largely offline; any activity picked up by an electroencephalogram or other device during rest was mostly random noise. At first, the advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the early 1990s only strengthened this view of the brain as an exquisitely frugal organ switching on and off its many parts as needed. By tracing blood flow through the brain, fMRI clearly showed that different neural circuits became especially active during different mental tasks, summoning extra blood full of oxygen and glucose to use as energy.

By the mid 1990s, however, Marcus Raichle of Washington University in Saint Louis and his colleagues had demonstrated that the human brain is in fact a glutton, constantly demanding 20 percent of all the energy the body produces and requiring only 5 to 10 percent more energy than usual when someone solves calculus problems or reads a book. Raichle also noticed that a particular set of scattered brain regions consistently became less active when someone concentrated on a mental challenge, but began to fire in synchrony when someone was simply lying supine in an fMRI scanner, letting their thoughts wander. Likewise, Bharat Biswal, now at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, documented the same kind of coordinated communication between disparate brain regions in people who were resting. Many researchers were dubious, but further studies by other scientists confirmed that the findings were not a fluke. Eventually this mysterious and complex circuit that stirred to life when people were daydreaming became known as the default mode network (DMN). In the last five years researchers discovered that the DMN is but one of at least five different resting-state networks-circuits for vision, hearing, movement, attention and memory. But the DMN remains the best studied and perhaps the most important among them.

In a recent thought-provoking review of research on the default mode network, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the University of Southern California and her co-authors argue that when we are resting the brain is anything but idle and that, far from being purposeless or unproductive, downtime is in fact essential to mental processes that affirm our identities, develop our understanding of human behavior and instill an internal code of ethics-processes that depend on the DMN. Downtime is an opportunity for the brain to make sense of what it has recently learned, to surface fundamental unresolved tensions in our lives and to swivel its powers of reflection away from the external world toward itself. While mind-wandering we replay conversations we had earlier that day, rewriting our verbal blunders as a way of learning to avoid them in the future. We craft fictional dialogue to practice standing up to someone who intimidates us or to reap the satisfaction of an imaginary harangue against someone who wronged us. We shuffle through all those neglected mental post-it notes listing half-finished projects and we mull over the aspects of our lives with which we are most dissatisfied, searching for solutions. We sink into scenes from childhood and catapult ourselves into different hypothetical futures. And we subject ourselves to a kind of moral performance review, questioning how we have treated others lately. These moments of introspection are also one way we form a sense of self, which is essentially a story we continually tell ourselves. When it has a moment to itself, the mind dips its quill into our memories, sensory experiences, disappointments and desires so that it may continue writing this ongoing first-person narrative of life.

Related research suggests that the default mode network is more active than is typical in especially creative people, and some studies have demonstrated that the mind obliquely solves tough problems while daydreaming-an experience many people have had while taking a shower. Epiphanies may seem to come out of nowhere, but they are often the product of unconscious mental activity during downtime. In a 2006 study, Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues asked 80 University of Amsterdam students to pick the best car from a set of four that-unbeknownst to the students-the researchers had previously ranked based on size, mileage, maneuverability and other features. Half the participants got four minutes to deliberate after reviewing the specs; the researchers prevented the other 40 from pondering their choices by distracting them with anagrams. Yet the latter group made far better decisions. Solutions emerge from the subconscious in this way only when the distracting task is relatively simple, such as solving an anagram or engaging in a routine activity that does not necessitate much deliberate concentration, like brushing one's teeth or washing dishes. With the right kind of distraction the default mode network may be able to integrate more information from a wide range of brain regions in more complex ways than when the brain is consciously working through a problem.

During downtime, the brain also concerns itself with more mundane but equally important duties. For decades scientists have suspected that when an animal or person is not actively learning something new, the brain consolidates recently accumulated data, memorizing the most salient information, and essentially rehearses recently learned skills, etching them into its tissue. Most of us have observed how, after a good night's sleep, the vocab words we struggled to remember the previous day suddenly leap into our minds or that technically challenging piano song is much easier to play. Dozens of studies have confirmed that memory depends on sleep.

More recently, scientists have documented what may well be physical evidence of such memory consolidation in animals that are awake but resting. When exploring a new environment-say, a maze-a rat's brain crackles with a particular pattern of electrical activity. A little while later, when that rat is sitting around, its brain sometimes re-creates a nearly identical pattern of electrical impulses zipping between the same set of neurons. The more those neurons communicate with one another, the stronger their connections become; meanwhile neglected and irrelevant neural pathways wither. Many studies indicate that in such moments-known as sharp-wave ripples-the rat is forming a memory.

In a 2009 study Gabrielle Girardeau, now at New York University, and her colleagues trained rats to find Cocoa Krispies consistently placed in the same branches of an eight-armed octo-maze. Following training sessions, while the rats were either sleeping or awake and resting, the researchers mildly zapped the brains of one group of rodents in a way that disrupted any sharp-wave ripples. Another group of rats received small electric shocks that did not interfere with ripples. The former group had a much harder time remembering where to find the food.

Several studies suggest that something similar happens in the human brain. In order to control their seizures, people with epilepsy sometimes undergo surgery that involves drilling through the skull and implanting electrodes in the brain. In such cases, some patients agree to let scientists record electrical activity picked up by those electrodes-a unique situation that avoids endangering people solely for the sake of neuroscience. In a 2008 study Nikolai Axmacher of the University of Bonn and his colleagues showed epilepsy patients a series of photos of houses and landscapes and tested their memories of those pictures following one-hour naps. During the naps, the researchers recorded electrical activity in a region of the brain known as the rhinal cortex, which is crucial for certain kinds of memory. As expected, the more sharp-wave ripples pulsed through the rhinal cortex, the better patients remembered the pictures. And such ripples occurred most frequently not when the patients were napping, but rather when they were lying awake in bed in the dark shortly before or after falling asleep.

A 2009 study by Chris Miall of the University of Birmingham and his colleagues complements this research. Twenty-four volunteers scooted inside an fMRI scanner and attempted to move a cursor in the center of a computer screen toward various pixelated targets by twiddling a joystick. Half the volunteers worked with a straightforward setup: when they moved the joystick left, the cursor moved left. The other half was stuck with a frustratingly fickle contraption: imagine trying to get the hang of a computer mouse that continuously rotates clockwise-suddenly right is up and left is down. All the participants rested inside the scanner before and after focusing on their assigned task.

Activity in resting state networks of the former group did not change much from one break to the next. But in the brains of volunteers who had previously struggled with the trick joystick, activity in two resting state networks was much more in sync than usual. This coordination likely reflects strengthened connections between those two circuits, Miall suspects, which in turn indicates that during rest the brain was likely ingraining what it had learned about working a strange and confusing tool. In contrast, the brains of volunteers that operated the conventional joystick had not learned anything new. In a yet-to-be-published follow-up experiment in which volunteers learned to press buttons in a particular sequence-and another study in which people studied a new language-Miall and his teammates reached similar conclusions about the importance of brain activity during rest for learning.

A tantalizing piece of evidence suggests that the brain may take advantage of every momentary lapse in attention to let resting state networks take over. In a study published last year, Tamami Nakano of Osaka University recorded electrical impulses in people's brains as they watched clips of British comedian Mr. Bean. The results revealed that the brain can fire up the DMN in the blink of an eye-literally. Every time we blink, circuits we use to consciously direct attention go quiet and the DMN briefly wakes up. Exactly what the DMN accomplishes in these interludes remains unclear, but it could very well be a form of memory consolidation or a moment for attention-directing neurons to catch their breath.

All in a day's work
That learning and memory depend on both sleep and waking rest may partially explain why some of the most exceptional artists and athletes among us fall into a daily routine of intense practice punctuated by breaks and followed by a lengthy period of recuperation. Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson of The Florida State University has spent more than 30 years studying how people achieve the highest levels of expertise. Based on his own work and a thorough review of the relevant research, Ericsson has concluded that most people can engage in deliberate practice-which means pushing oneself beyond current limits-for only an hour without rest; that extremely talented people in many different disciplines-music, sports, writing-rarely practice more than four hours each day on average; and that many experts prefer to begin training early in the morning when mental and physical energy is readily available. "Unless the daily levels of practice are restricted, such that subsequent rest and nighttime sleep allow the individuals to restore their equilibrium," Ericsson wrote, "individuals often encounter overtraining injuries and, eventually, incapacitating 'burnout.'"

These principles are derived from the rituals of the exceptional, but they are useful for just about anyone in any profession, including typical nine-to-fivers. Corporate America may never sanction working only four hours a day, but research suggests that to maximize productivity we should reform the current model of consecutive 40-hour workweeks separated only by two-day weekends and sometimes interrupted by short vacations.

Psychologists have established that vacations have real benefits. Vacations likely revitalize the body and mind by distancing people from job-related stress; by immersing people in new places, cuisines and social circles, which in turn may lead to original ideas and insights; and by giving people the opportunity to get a good night's sleep and to let their minds drift from one experience to the next, rather than forcing their brains to concentrate on a single task for hours at a time. But a recent comprehensive meta-analysis by Jessica de Bloom, now at the University of Tampere in Finland, demonstrates that these benefits generally fade within two to four weeks. In one of de Bloom's own studies 96 Dutch workers reported feeling more energetic, happier, less tense and more satisfied with their lives than usual during a winter sports vacation between seven and nine days long. Within one week of returning to work, however, all the feelings of renewal dissipated. A second experiment on four and five days of respite came to essentially the same conclusion. A short vacation is like a cool shower on an oppressively muggy summer day-a refreshing yet fleeting escape.

Instead of limiting people to a single weeklong vacation each year or a few three-day vacations here and there, companies should also allow their employees to take a day or two off during the workweek and encourage workers to banish all work-related tasks from their evenings. In a four-year study, Leslie Perlow of the Harvard Business School and her colleagues tracked the work habits of employees at the Boston Consulting Group. Each year they insisted that employees take regular time off, even when they did not think they should be away from the office. In one experiment each of five consultants on a team took a break from work one day a week. In a second experiment every member of a team scheduled one weekly night of uninterrupted personal time, even though they were accustomed to working from home in the evenings.

Everyone resisted at first, fearing they would only be postponing work. But over time the consultants learned to love their scheduled time off because it consistently replenished their willingness and ability to work, which made them more productive overall. After five months employees experimenting with deliberate periodic rest were more satisfied with their jobs, more likely to envision a long-term future at the company, more content with their work-life balance and prouder of their accomplishments.

Tony Schwartz, a journalist and CEO of The Energy Project, has made a career out of teaching people to be more productive by changing the way they think about downtime. His strategy relies in part on the idea that anyone can learn to regularly renew their reservoirs of physical and mental energy. "People are working so many hours that not only in most cases do they not have more hours they could work, but there's also strong evidence that when they work for too long they get diminishing returns in terms of health costs and emotional costs," Schwartz says. "If time is no longer an available resource, what is? The answer is energy."

Schwartz and his colleagues encourage workers to get seven to eight hours of sleep every night, to use all their vacation days, take power naps and many small breaks during the day, practice meditation, and tackle the most challenging task first thing in the morning so they can give it their full attention. "Many things we are suggesting are in some ways very simple and on some level are things people already knew, but they are moving at such extraordinary speed that they have convinced themselves they are not capable of those behaviors," Schwartz says.

The Energy Project's approach was a tough sell at first-because it contradicts the prevailing ethos that busier is better-but the organization has so far successfully partnered with Google, Apple, Facebook, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, Ford, Genentech and a wide range of Fortune 500 companies. To gauge how employees improve over time, Schwartz measures their level of engagement-that is, how much they like their jobs and are willing to go above and beyond their basic duties-a trait that many studies have correlated with performance. Admittedly, this is not the most precise or direct measurement, but Schwartz says that time and again his strategies have pushed workers' overall engagement well above the average level and that Google has been satisfied enough to keep up the partnership for more than five years.

Put your mind at rest
Many recent studies have corroborated the idea that our mental resources are continuously depleted throughout the day and that various kinds of rest and downtime can both replenish those reserves and increase their volume. Consider, for instance, how even an incredibly brief midday nap enlivens the mind.

By adulthood, most of us have adopted the habit of sleeping through the night and staying awake for most or all of the day-but this may not be ideal for our mental health and is certainly not the only way people have slept throughout history. In somewhat the same way that hobbits in Tolkien's Middle Earth enjoy a first and second breakfast, people living without electricity in preindustrial Europe looked forward to a first and second sleep divided by about an hour of crepuscular activity. During that hour, they would pray, relieve themselves, smoke tobacco, have sex and even visit neighbors. Some researchers have proposed that people are also physiologically inclined to snooze during a 2 P.M. to 4 P.M. "nap zone"-or what some might call the afternoon slump-because the brain prefers to toggle between sleep and wake more than once a day. As far back as the first century B.C. the Romans regularly took midafternoon breaks, which they called meridiari from the Latin for midday. Under the influence of Roman Catholicism, noon became known as sexta (the sixth hour, according to their clocks), a time for rest and prayer. Eventually sexta morphed into siesta.

Plenty of studies have established that naps sharpen concentration and improve the performance of both the sleep-deprived and the fully rested on all kinds of tasks, from driving to medical care. A 2004 study, for example, analyzed four years of data on highway car accidents involving Italian policemen and concluded that the practice of napping before night shifts reduced the prospective number of collisions by 48 percent. In a 2002 study by Rebecca Smith-Coggins of Stanford University and her colleagues, 26 physicians and nurses working three consecutive 12-hour night shifts napped for 40 minutes at 3 A.M. while 23 of their colleagues worked continuously without sleeping. Although doctors and nurses that had napped scored lower than their peers on a memory test at 4 A.M., at 7:30 A.M. they outperformed the no-nap group on a test of attention, more efficiently inserted a catheter in a virtual simulation and were more alert during an interactive simulation of driving a car home.

Long naps work great when people have enough time to recover from "sleep inertia"-post-nap grogginess that, in some cases, can take more than two hours to fade. In other situations micronaps may be a smarter strategy. An intensive 2006 study by Amber Brooks and Leon Lack of Flinders University in Australia and their colleagues pitted naps of five, 10, 20 and 30 minutes against one another to find out which was most restorative. Over a span of three years 24 college students periodically slept for only five hours on designated nights. The day after each of those nights they visited the lab to nap and take tests of attention that required them to respond quickly to images on a screen, complete a word search and accurately copy sequences of arcane symbols.

A five-minute nap barely increased alertness, but naps of 10, 20 and 30 minutes all improved the students' scores. But volunteers that napped 20 or 30 minutes had to wait half an hour or more for their sleep inertia to wear off before regaining full alertness, whereas 10-minute naps immediately enhanced performance just as much as the longer naps without any grogginess. An explanation for this finding, Brooks and Lack speculate, may involve the brain's so-called " sleep switch." Essentially, one cluster of neurons is especially important for keeping us awake, whereas another distinct circuit induces sleepiness. When neurons in one region fire rapidly they directly inhibit the firing of neurons in the other region, thereby operating as a sleep/wake switch. Neurons in the wake circuit likely become fatigued and slow down after many hours of firing during the day, which allows the neurons in the sleep circuit to speed up and initiate the flip to a sleep state. Once someone begins to doze, however, a mere seven to 10 minutes of sleep may be enough to restore the wake-circuit neurons to their former excitability.

Although some start-ups and progressive companies provide their employees with spaces to nap at the office, most workers in the U.S. do not have that option. An equally restorative and likely far more manageable solution to mental fatigue is spending more time outdoors-in the evenings, on the weekends and even during lunch breaks by walking to a nearby park, riverfront or anywhere not dominated by skyscrapers and city streets. Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of South Carolina and a pioneer of a relatively new field called ecopsychology, argues that whereas the hustle and bustle of a typical city taxes our attention, natural environments restore it. Contrast the experience of walking through Times Square in New York City-where the brain is ping-ponged between neon lights, honking taxies and throngs of tourists-with a day hike in a nature reserve, where the mind is free to leisurely shift its focus from the calls of songbirds to the gurgling and gushing of rivers to sunlight falling through every gap in the tree branches and puddling on the forest floor.

In one of the few controlled ecopsychology experiments, Berman asked 38 University of Michigan students to study lists of random numbers and recite them from memory in reverse order before completing another attention-draining task in which they memorized the locations of certain words arranged in a grid. Half the students subsequently strolled along a predefined path in an arboretum for about an hour whereas the other half walked the same distance through highly trafficked streets of downtown Ann Arbor for the same period of time. Back at the lab the students memorized and recited digits once again. On average, volunteers that had ambled among trees recalled 1.5 more digits than the first time they took the test; those who had walked through the city improved by only 0.5 digits-a small but statistically significant difference between the two groups.

Beyond renewing one's powers of concentration, downtime can in fact bulk up the muscle of attention-something that scientists have observed repeatedly in studies on meditation. There are almost as many varieties and definitions of meditation as there are people who practice it. Although meditation is not equivalent to zoning out or daydreaming, many styles challenge people to sit in a quiet space, close their eyes and turn their attention away from the outside world toward their own minds. Mindfulness meditation, for example, generally refers to a sustained focus on one's thoughts, emotions and sensations in the present moment. For many people, mindfulness is about paying close attention to whatever the mind does on its own, as opposed to directing one's mind to accomplish this or that.

Mindfulness training has become more popular than ever in the last decade as a strategy to relieve stress, anxiety and depression. Many researchers acknowledge that studies on the benefits of mindfulness often lack scientific rigor, use too few participants and rely too heavily on people's subjective reports, but at this point they have gathered enough evidence to conclude that meditation can indeed improve mental health, hone one's ability to concentrate and strengthen memory. Studies comparing long-time expert meditators with novices or people who do not meditate often find that the former outperform the latter on tests of mental acuity.

In a 2009 study, for example, Sara van Leeuwen of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Germany and her colleagues tested the visual attention of three groups of volunteers: 17 adults around 50 years old with up to 29 years of meditation practice; 17 people of the same age and gender who were not longtime meditators; and another 17 young adults who had never meditated before. In the test, a series of random letters flashed on a computer screen, concealing two digits in their midst. Volunteers had to identify both numerals and to guess if they did not glimpse one in time; recognizing the second number is often difficult because earlier images mask it. Performance on such tests usually declines with age, but the expert meditators outscored both their peers and the younger participants.

Heleen Slagter of Leiden University in Amsterdam and her colleagues used the same type of attention test in a 2007 study to compare 17 people who had just completed a three-month meditation retreat in Barre, Mass., with 23 mindfulness-curious volunteers who were meditating around 20 minutes a day. Both groups were evenly matched before their training, but when the retreat was over the meditation marathoners trumped the novices. Judging by recordings from an electroencephalogram, 90 days of meditation likely made the brain more efficient, so that it used up less available attention to successfully complete the test.

Rather profound changes to the brain's structure and behavior likely underlie many of these improvements. Numerous studies have shown that meditation strengthens connections between regions of the default mode network, for example, and can help people learn to more effectively shift between the DMN and circuits that are most active when we are consciously fixated on a task. Over time expert meditators may also develop a more intricately wrinkled cortex-the brain's outer layer, which is necessary for many of our most sophisticated mental abilities, like abstract thought and introspection. Meditation appears to increase the volume and density of the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped area of the brain that is absolutely crucial for memory; it thickens regions of the frontal cortex that we rely on to rein in our emotions; and it stymies the typical wilting of brain areas responsible for sustaining attention as we get older.

Just how quickly meditation can noticeably change the brain and mind is not yet clear. But a handful of experiments suggest that a couple weeks of meditation or a mere 10 to 20 minutes of mindfulness a day can whet the mind-if people stick with it. Likewise, a few studies indicate that meditating daily is ultimately more important than the total hours of meditation over one's lifetime.

In a 2007 study by Richard Chambers of the University of Melbourne, 40 people between the ages of 21 and 63 took various tests of attention and working memory, a collection of mental talents that allow someone to temporarily store and manipulate information. Half the volunteers completed the tests immediately before participating in an intensive 10-day meditation course-something they had never done before-and took the same tests again seven to 10 days after the course ended. The other half also took the tests on two occasions 21 days apart but did not practice any meditation. Whereas people who meditated performed quite a bit better on the tests the second time around, those who did not meditate showed no meaningful improvement. Similarly, in a 2007 study, 40 Chinese college students scored higher on attention tests after a mere 20 minutes of mindfulness-related meditation a day for five days, whereas 40 of their peers who did not meditate did not improve. And as little as 12 minutes of mindfulness meditation a day helped prevent the stress of military service from deteriorating the working memory of 34 U.S. marines in a 2011 study conducted by Amishi Jha, now at the University of Miami, and her colleagues.

"When people in the military have a gym they will work out in the gym. When they are on the side of a mountain they will make do with what they have and do push-ups to stay in shape," Jha says. "Mindfulness training may offer something similar for the mind. It's low-tech and easy to implement." In her own life, Jha looks for any and all existing opportunities to practice mindfulness, such as her 15-minute trip to and from work each day.

Likewise, Michael Taft advocates deliberate mental breaks during "all the in-between moments" in an average day-a subway ride, lunch, a walk to the bodega. He stresses, though, that there's a big difference between admiring the idea of more downtime and committing to it in practice. "Getting out into nature on the weekends, meditating, putting away our computers now and then-a lot of it is stuff we already know we should probably do," he says. "But we have to be a lot more diligent about it. Because it really does matter."

Editor's Note: This article originally stated that researchers sometimes implant electrodes in the brains of epilepsy patients undergoing surgery. In fact, doctors implant these electrodes as part of the surgery and researchers record from them. The text has been edited to reflect this distinction.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Ferris Jabr

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer for Scientific American. He has also written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and Outside.

Credit: Nick Higgins

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Every now and then during the workweek-usually around three in the afternoon-a familiar ache begins to saturate my forehead and pool in my temples. The glare of my computer screen appears to suddenly intensify. My eyes trace the contour of the same sentence two or three times, yet I fail to extract its meaning.

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Helpful Quotes/articles for ERIC and NCSS database articles

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Helpful Quotes/articles for ERIC and NCSS database articles

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themes?

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Regan Urban - strategies used in social studies

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Regan Urban - strategies used in social studies

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“In effective social studies programs, elementary teachers use a variety of approaches, strategies, and materials to support children’s interests and abilities. As new information or skills are presented, teachers facilitate discourse and students consider new ideas and assimilate multiple perspectives.Processes such as problem solving, debates, simulations, project-based learning, and role playing are active strategies that can lead to new opportunities for student discovery and engagement.Teachers decide when to take the lead during instruction and when to support the students’ leadership in learning.They guide rather than dictate.” (Berson, Bennett, & Dobson, Dorothy, 2009, p. para. E)

(ACTIVE STRATEGIES - Keep interest as well as student time on task increased.)

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Regan Urban - physical environment consideration

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Regan Urban - physical environment consideration

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“Research on the relationship between the physical

environment and learning confirms what would seem self-evident to most teachers – that the physical environment influences not only academic learning, but also behavior in general.” (O'Mahony & Siegel, 2008, p. 20)

(Is social studies lack of time on task related to the physical set up of the classroom? How to manage this when space is highly limited... however change may increase stamina/interest/time on task.)