Children’s Challenging Behaviour: Teachers’ Understanding and Intervention

Challenging behaviours are observable behaviours that can affect the environment and often have a negative influence in the child and those around. The concept of challenging behavior (CD) refers to behavior difficulties or problems that can be shown be children, teenagers or adults. This concept appears to characterize the behavior as a challenge instead of labeling people as a problem. From this point of view, challenging behaviours are seen through the view of development psychology, and perceived as developmental struggles or delays in social, emotional and academic areas. The causes for challenging behaviours are diverse, resulting from genetic vulnerabilities and environmental stress The probable causes for disruptive and challenging behaviours can be explained through an ecological approach, based on Bronfenbrenner’s findings (1979). Challenging behaviours fulfill a function or purpose and are kept by the individual as long as they show themselves to be a successful adaptation to the environment. The pattern for challenging behaviours changes considerably according to the considered target characteristics and the age of individuals. Individuals with challenging behaviours are not all alike. We should focus on the behaviours’ target characteristics because they describe the behaviours to change

An information theory based behavioral model for agent-based crowd simulations

Crowds must be simulated believable in terms of their appearance and behavior to improve a virtual environment’s realism. Due to the complex nature of human behavior, realistic behavior of agents in crowd simulations is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel behavioral model which builds analytical maps to control agents’ behavior adaptively with agent-crowd interaction formulations. We introduce information theoretical concepts to construct analytical maps automatically. Our model can be integrated into crowd simulators and enhance their behavioral complexity. We made comparative analyses of the presented behavior model with measured crowd data and two agent-based crowd simulators

An implementation of the behavior annex in the AADL-toolset Osate2

AADL is a modeling language to design and analyze High-Integrity Distributed and Real-time systems. Embedded sub-languages published as AADL annexes extend an AADL model to enhance analysis. The behavior annex specifies the behavior of an AADL application model. An implantation of this annex allows to perform behavior analysis. In addition, as there are several AADL annexes, the implementation of generic mechanisms to support each one of them is challenging. The behavior annex is a valid candidate to illustrate these challenges by combining several sub-languages. In this paper we expose our experiment to support the behavior annex in the reference AADL toolset OSATE2. This one, supports the AADL version 2 by providing a front-end and a set of analysis plug-ins to analyze an AADL model

Case record analysis

It is argued that the determinates of low frequency (less than once an hour) challenging behavior are likely to be more complex than those of high frequency behavior involving setting events that may not be present when the behavior occurs. The analysis of case records is then examined as a method of identifying possible setting events to low frequency behaviours. It is suggested that time series analysis, correlational analysis and time lag sequential analysis may all be useful methods in the examination of case records

Parenting Latino Toddlers and Preschoolers: Clinical and Nonclinical Samples

Parenting practices contribute significantly to the social-emotional development of young children. There is limited literature that addresses the role of culture in parenting, particularly among Latino families who have very young children with significant behavior problems. The current study compared the parenting practices of 30 low-income Latino mothers whose young children had been referred for mental health services for their behavior problems with a similar group of 30 mothers of children without behavior problems. Results showed that mothers in the clinical sample nurtured their children less often and used more frequent verbal and corporal punishment as discipline than the nonclinical sample. The clinical sample also had a significantly higher incidence of mental health problems in their families. Results also showed the significant toll that raising young children with challenging behaviors takes on their mothers. The implications of these findings for the early identification of these children are discussed

Destabilization of a flow focused suspension of magnetotactic bacteria

Active matter is a new class of material, intrinsically out-of equilibrium with intriguing properties. So far, the recent upsurge of studies has mostly focused on the spontaneous behavior of these systems --in the absence of external constraints or driving--. Yet, many real life systems evolve under constraints, being both submitted to flow and various taxis. In the present work, we demonstrate a new experimental system which opens up the way for quantitative investigations, and discriminating examinations, of the challenging theoretical description of such systems. We explore the behavior of magnetotactic bacteria as a particularly rich and versatile class of driven matter, which behavior can be studied under contrasting and contradicting stimuli. In particular we demonstrate that the competing driving of an orienting magnetic field and hydrodynamic flow lead not only to jetting, but also unveils a new pearling instability. This illustrates new structuring capabilities of driven active matter