The Effect of Preteaching Reading Skills on the On-Task Behavior of Children Identified with Behavioral Disorders:

* An estimated 489,000 students are classified with an emotional disturbance (National Center for Education Statistics, 2004), which is often associated with aggressive behavior, poor academic and social functioning, and disruptive off-task behavior (Kehle, Bray, Theodore, Zhou, & McCoach, 2004). The relationship between behavioral problems and academic difficulties is complex. Perhaps some students with behavioral disorders (BDs) exhibit academic difficulties prior to being evaluated for BD and their frustration with academic tasks is linked to off-task and disruptive behavior (Huesmann, Eron, & Yarmel, 1987). Other students with challenging behaviors may exhibit the behavioral concerns prior to their academic difficulties. This type of student may enter school without the appropriate social-emotional skills to successfully participate in the educational process and therefore fall further behind academically as a result (Talbott & Coe, 1997).It appears that academic difficulties and disruptive behaviors form a cycle of aversive behavior and academic failure (Cullinan, Osborne, & Epstein, 2004). The result of this cycle of failure can be educationally catastrophic in that more than 50% of students diagnosed as emotionally or behaviorally disordered drop out of school (U.S. Department of Education, 2002). Yet most interventions for children with BDs tend to focus on managing the behavioral difficulties and frequently ignore any academic deficits (Rivera, Al-Otaiba, & Koorland, 2006).Reading is perhaps the most important academic skill a child can learn, and failure to do so could have lifelong negative implications (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Moreover, reading interventions for children with behavioral difficulties could be especially important given their link to improved social competence. Previous research consistently found that reading interventions with children identified with BDs led to improved reading and behavioral outcomes (Lane, 1999; Lane et al., 2002; Lane, O'Shaughnessy, Lambros, Gresham, & Beebe-Frankenberger, 2001; Locke & Fuchs, 1995; Spencer Scruggs, & Mastropieri, 2003; Sutherland & Snyder, 2007; Wehby, Falk, Barton-Arwood, Lane, & Cooley, 2003). In fact, reading interventions resulted in small to moderate effects on social variables as well, which were approximately the effect size values for interventions explicitly designed to address social outcomes (Wanzek, Vaughn, Kim, & Cavanaugh, 2006).The link between behavioral outcomes and academic skills was first suggested when Gickling and Armstrong (1978) demonstrated that children taught at an instructional level, using Betts (1946) classic definition of the term, demonstrated higher rates of on-task behavior. Subsequent research has continuously supported increased on-task behavior when students were presented an appropriate level of challenge (Burns & Dean, 2005; Treptow, Burns, & McComas, 2007). Moreover, rates of on-task behavior decreased dramatically, whereas rates of disruptive behavior increased when students identified as BD were presented with difficult material, but a more appropriately challenging task led to higher rates of on-task behavior and decreased disruptive behavior (DePaepe, Shores, Jack, & Denny, 1996). These findings could be due to off-task behavior serving as an escape mechanism for students who were asked to complete difficult problems (McComas, Hoch, Paone, & El-Roy, 2000), but the causal mechanism is unknown and likely idiosyncratic for each student.There are several ways to present students with less challenging materials including selecting materials that represent a closer match to the students' skill levels (Treptow et al., 2006). Alternatively, unknown items within an assigned learning task could be pretaught to better match student skill and task demands (Burns, 2007). Preteaching is any instruction that occurs prior to the primary academic lesson (Rose, 1984) and has been consistently shown to increase reading and math skills among struggling learners (Browder & Xin, 1998; Burns, 2002; 2007; Burns, Dean, & Foley, 2004; Rose, 1984). …