Behavioral self-regulation

Students with disabilities often exhibit low rates of academic engagement (Barrett, Bradshaw, & Lewis-Palmer, 2008; Harrison et al., 2012), which directly impacts in- and post-school success (Wagner et al., 2006). Fortunately, self-regulation interventions have a long history of improving academic engagement (Bruhn et al., 2015, 2016; Carter et al., 2011). Self-regulation interventions often target multiple strategies (e.g., goal-setting, self-monitoring, self-evaluation) and include multiple components (e.g., feedback, reinforcement), yet it remains unknown which strategies have a greater impact on academic engagement. In this dissertation, I implemented a multiple-probe single-case design with an alternating treatments component to evaluate the differential impact of self-set daily goal reminders versus self-monitoring on the academic engagement of high school students with challenging behavior who were receiving special education services (i.e., labeled “eligible individual” in state of Iowa). Visual analysis indicated no functional relations existed between academic engagement and either goal reminders or self-monitoring. However, two students demonstrated modest improvements in engagement when using goal reminders and one student demonstrated improvements when using self-monitoring. Within the comparative phase in which treatments were randomly alternated, there was no clear separation of data paths, indicating there was no superior treatment. Practical implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.