An Effective Point and Level System for a Self-Contained Emotional Behavior Disorders Program to Decrease Challenging Behaviors

The purpose of this study was to identify what kind of impact an effective point and level system has on challenging behaviors for students with Emotional Behavior Disorders (E/BD) in a self-contained classroom. The participants in this study were students with Emotional Behavior Disorders, who were attending their classes in a self-contained E/BD classroom due to the amount of support their Individual Education Plan (IEP) team determined they needed to be successful in the academic setting. Students had been participating in the self-contained classroom with a point and level system in place along with academics being taught, however students struggled to refrain from displaying challenging/disruptive behaviors and following classroom expectations and rules to move into a lesser restrictive setting. During this study, the point and level system was updated based on research findings and the instructional strategies used will remained the same. The results of this study show that five out of six students made progress with the intervention in place. The results show that the updated point and level system was successful for most of the study participants and confirms the research completed by Cancio & Johnson (2007), Walker, Clancy, Tsai, & Cheney (2013)