THE EFFECT OF CANTERS ASSERTIVE DISCIPLINE PROGRAM ON TEACHER AND STUDENT BEHAVIOR

A multiple baseline research design across sample and settings was uti lised to examine the effects of Canter's Assertive Discipline Program (1979) on teachers' rates of verbal approval and disapproval, student on task behaviour, and the frequency of students' disruptive behaviour . Classes from Years three, four and five in five separate British pri mary schools were the participants (in total 15 teachers and 120 stude nts) of the study. During daily mathematics lessons the teachers and a target group of eight students from each class were video-recorded fo r 30 minutes. These observations were undertaken prior to and followin g the teachers completing a workshop in Assertive Discipline. Data wer e analysed in two ways. First, a one-way repeated measures analysis of variance was calculated to test for significant differences in pre- a nd post-group means. Second, data for individual teachers and classes were analysed using DMITSA 2.0 (Crosbie & Sharpley, 1991) which is a s tatistical programme specifically developed to analyse data from inter rupted time-series designs. Overall, teacher approval increased and te acher disapproval decreased, student on-task behaviour increased, and the frequency of disruptive behaviour decreased, all significantly. An alyses of individual teacher trends showed, however, that not all teac hers' and students' behaviour changed significantly.