A Meta-Analysis of Interventions to Decrease Disruptive Classroom Behavior in Public Education Settings

We conducted a meta-analysis of 99 studies that used interventions to decrease disruptive classroom behavior in public education settings. Due to the predominance of single-subject studies, we used the Interrupted Time Series Autocorrelation program (ITSACORR; Crosbie, 1993) which yielded a t statistic that was transformed into an effect size. A total of 223 effect sizes yielded a mean effect size of-.78, indicating that, on average, 78% of the treated students reduced their disruptive behavior compared to nontreated students. We found that studies using teacher rating scales were less likely to evidence reductions in disruptive classroom behaviors compared to studies using behavioral observation methodologies. We also found that students treated in self-contained classrooms were more likely to evidence a reduction in disruptive classroom behavior compared to students treated in regular classroom settings. With the exclusion of studies using teacher rating scales, comparison of treatment interventions showed no statistically reliable differences due to the large variability in the relative effectiveness for students treated. Overall, results indicate that interventions to reduce disruptive classroom behavior yield comparable results to other meta-analytic studies investigating the effectiveness of psychotherapy for children and adolescents. This indicates that there are efficacious treatments used in public education settings to to decrease disruptive classroom behaviors.