Answer to your classmate’s post in no more than 100 words
9 hours ago
In this scenario, James might define Saras out-of-seat behavior as any instance when Saras bottom leaves the seat and she moves away from her desk within one foot or more without permission from the teacher to be out of her seat. Also out-of-seat behavior would not include times when the expectation is for her to leave her seat for other valid reasons (recess, bathroom, other exercises that require her to leave her seat) or for standing up for 5 seconds or less without leaving the 1-foot radius of her desk.
In order to measure Saras out-of-seat behavior, I would focus on the length of time such a behavior occurred (duration). This might be more relevant than the frequency in this example. To measure her behavior, I would consider a simple stopwatch that could be pressed each time she leaves her seat under the conditions stated above, and depressed when she returns to her seat. The stopwatch could maintain its duration count by James simply continuing the duration count for the next instance without resetting the clock in order to simplify the process. Using this method, James could use the sum of the clock time at the end of each day as his data.
Alternatively, depending on the duration of Saras behavior and the frequency of occurrences, James could break his observations during the day into intervals and use whole interval recording to measure her out-of-seat behavior. This would minimize the teachers need to stay on-task in measuring Saras behavior for the entire day since that could be impractical for him. One possibility would be to track Saras behavior for the first 10 minutes of each hour. An additional timer could alert James to begin and end each observation period. James would want to keep in mind that whole interval recording would underestimate the occurrence of her behavior (Cooper et al., 2020). According to Cooper et al. (2020), whole interval recording would be more effectively used for a very high frequency or continuous behavior. James would want to modify his methods depending on the frequency of the behavior and consider the artifacts of these measurement systems when interpreting the data (Cooper et al., 2020).
An alternative method would be to measure a different behavior that might be more relevant to the actual behavior of concern, such as approaching other students desks or talking out of turn, if those are actually more specifically the behaviors of concern.
References
Cooper, J. O., Heron, T. E., & Heward, W. L. (2020). Applied behavior analysis (3rd ed.). Pearson Education, Inc.
Miltenberger, R. G. (2016). Behavior modification: Principles and procedures (6th ed.). Cengage Learning.
