Targeted behavior and off-task behavior of students
Through data collection, educators and teachers can determine whether the behavior of their students is problematic and therefore requires an intervention (Lingo, Barton-Arwood & Jolivette, 2011). Once teachers have defined target behavior operationally or the behavior that needs to be changed, they should adopt a data-collection system that provides the most accurate picture of the performance of the student in the classroom. Duration and latency recording are the two conventional methods that can be used to collect such data. In duration recording, the educator documents how long the student is engaged in a specified behavior, and therefore is appropriate for behaviors that have a specific starting and ending, or those that take place at high rates (Lingo, Barton-Arwood & Jolivette, 2011). In latency recording, the educator often measures the amount of time that lapses between an antecedent like an instruction from the teacher, and when the learner starts to perform a specified behavior.
In the assigned video, Katlyn (the name of the student) engages in off-task behaviors during independent math activities. The students are instructed to complete their homework on math before embarking on another activity. Still, Katlyn seems to be engaged in off-task behavior like looking around the classroom, playing with her pencil, and sharpening her pencil using the sharper. The student was observed for 5 minutes. The total duration of time off task was 145 seconds. To calculate the percentage of time off the task for the session, we divide 145 seconds by 300 seconds, which is the total duration of the observation. From this simple math, the percentage of time off the task for the session was 48 percent. The average latency recorded for the student to start working following a teacher’s antecedent was 35 seconds.
Based on my personal observation and the data collected, the student’s off-task behavior was of high intensity or above-average magnitude. Nearly half of the time is spent by the student in off-task behaviors, which makes too much. It means the student spends 50 percent of the time doing things that are not related to the targeted behavior, making it undesirable. The percentage of the time that the student was engaged in off-ask behavior is problematic. The student spends quite a lot of time gazing and looking around the classroom and playing with the pencil, including in some incidences her fingers, which draws her attention away from the task at hand (Sarah et al., 2019). With her attention taken away, the student’s time spent doing the actual task is limited, and therefore her performance is likely to be significantly impacted in the negative sense (Sarah et al., 2019).
The operational definition provided created a clear framework and pathway for collecting the observation data. The definition is made more evident by providing some of the off-task behaviors that the students are engaged in following the teacher’s instruction. Some of these examples include looking around the room, playing with her hands, and other objects like the pencil.
The most outstanding challenge in measuring latency and duration of the targeted behaviors is having to balance between watching the stopwatch and observing the targeted behaviors. In some instances, it is difficult to know whether the student is engaged in off-task behaviors or not, especially considering that part of these behaviors can fall in both categories of targeted behavior and off-task behavior. For instance, when the student sharpens her pencil, for some people, this can be considered a targeted behavior because it helps in solving the math problems. For some people, however, the student is engaged in off-task behavior by sharpening the pencil.