Exploring the effectiveness of Self-management Programs for Students with Disruptive Behaviors: A Comprehensive Literature Review

Disruptive behaviors exhibited by children and youth pose a major problem for students exhibiting the behaviors, their peers, parents, and teachers. Disruptive behaviors including shouting, aggression, off-task behaviors, and noncompliance, correlate with poor social skills, low peer acceptance, higher rates of academic deficiencies, and in adulthood instability in relationships and employment. Self-management programs employ traditional behavior management methods and with self-management components to teach students to self-monitor or evaluate their behavior. By teaching students to be aware of and to manage their own behavior students may be better able to generalize appropriate behaviors to other less supervised settings, complete more work, and experience a sense of accomplishment for controlling their behavior. Past reviews of self-management literature have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-management interventions in changing disruptive behaviors and documented limitations of the research. However, the most recent review was completed over a decade ago, therefore a current review of self-management programs for disruptive behaviors was completed. The review indicated that recent literature has corrected some past limitations by studying a larger variety of age groups in different settings and by providing replicable intervention steps. Unfortunately, many variables continue to be neglected (e.g., generalization, maintenance, social validity, treatment integrity). The strengths and limitations of current self-management literature as applied to changing disruptive behaviors exhibited by youth are discussed and areas for future research recommended