Inappropriate behaviors are common during hallway transitions. Researchers have successfully reduced hallway transition times using the Timely Transitions Game, which involves applying interdependent group rewards delivered contingent upon a class’s transition time. A multiple-baseline design was used to evaluate effects of a modified Timely Transitions Game (i.e., a response cost component was added to typical Timely Transition Game procedures) on inappropriate hallway transition behavior across three elementary summer program classrooms. Visual analysis of a repeated-measures graph and statistical analysis suggested that the modified Timely Transitions Game caused immediate, consistent, and meaningful reductions in inappropriate transition behaviors across classrooms. The modified Timely Transitions Game may be an effective prevention and remediation procedure consistent with approaches focusing on reducing inappropriate behavior via the application of behavioral strategies. Discussion is focused on the need for additional studies to evaluate longitudinal effects and the generalizability of the current findings.
Online evaluations of courses, although reputedly useful to students, instructors, and administrators, have been very limited in most college courses because of low response rates. With this scarcity in mind, we evaluated the effects of 3 interventions involving contingent extra credit on improvement of course-evaluation response rates to online evaluations (N = 162). The 3 interventions consisted of a small individual extra-credit incentive, a small group extra-credit incentive, and a formative-evaluation strategy in which extra credit was contingent on a pledge to submit course evaluations. At the end of the semester, we compared these response rates to one another and to previous-year course and campus response rates. The individual and group extra-credit incentives produced significantly higher submission rates than the previous-year percentages in the target course when instructors awarded no extra credit for submitting or pledging to submit course evaluations. Although students claimed that information regarding the beneficial effects of student evaluation on course improvement would motivate them to complete the evaluations, the results indicated that this claim did not increase course-evaluation response rates (even when instructors awarded extra credit for making the claim). End-of-semester response rates under the credit contingencies for submitting the course evaluations greatly exceeded the response rates in the university as a whole the previous year.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.