The Effects of School-Wide Positive Behavior Intervention Supports on Students with Emotional Behavior Disorders in Elementary Schools

The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of implementing School-Wide Positive Behavior Intervention Supports (SWPBIS) in elementary schools for students with Emotional Behavior Disorders (EBD) that engaged in poor adaptive behaviors. Therefore, the researcher seeked to determine if there existed a difference in the overall adaptive scores of elementary students with EBD who attended a SWPBIS school and a non-SWPBIS school. The purpose of this research study was to determine if the implementation of SWPBIS decreased the poor adaptive scores among students with EBD and if lower adaptive scores decreased the chance of disruptive and violent behaviors. Higher adaptive behavior scores are stronger predictors for violence among youths (Koth et al., 2009). A causal-comparative design study was used to evaluate the effectiveness of SWPBIS on the adaptive behavior scores of elementary students with EBD. The instrument that was used for the evaluation was the Teacher Observation Classroom Adaptive-Checklist (TOCA-C) developed by the Woodlawn Research Center in Chicago. A convenience sample of a minimum of 100 teachers selected from 20 elementary schools located in a suburban school district outside of a metropolitan city in Georgia during the fall semester of the 2017-2018 school year was used in this study. A MANOVA statistical analysis was used to analyze the research data