Good Behavior Game

The first study of GBG was published in 1969, using a 4th grade classroom. The study was the first application of applied behavior analysis to a whole classroom. In the original study, the classroom was divided into two teams. The students were to engage in the math or reading activities as teams. Paying attention, engaging in the lessons or activity, was the "good behavior". If students engaged in actions that interfered with the lesson (e.g., getting out their seat, interrupting), that was a penalty point against the team—much like playing a sport. Each team could make up a fixed number of mistakes, and still win the game. That is much like professional sports, except both teams could win. If a team won the game, they earned an activity reward normally not allowed, which was based on the Premack Principle. Since the original 1969 study, the Good Behavior Game has become an efficient system to aid in preventing mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders.

Overview

The Good Behavior Game was first used in 1967 in Baldwin City, Kansas by Muriel Saunders, who was then a new teacher in a fourth-grade classroom. Muriel Saunders, Harriet Barrish (a graduate student at the University of Kansas), and the professor and co-founder of applied-behavior analysis, the late Montrose Wolfe, co-created the Good Behavior Game in 1969. The Game works by positive peer pressure of 2-to-5 classroom teams, who work together reduce inattentive, disturbing, disruptive, and destructive behaviors that interfere with learning and success. When the teams succeed, all the "winners" earn brief intrinsic activity rewards based on Premack's principle. While the teacher can define the behaviors to be reduced, the game can be just as effective when students define the behaviors to be reduced to make a better learning environment. A scientific major proponent of the benefits of GBG, Dennis Embry argues that the game is more likely to be acceptable, adopted, and sustained by teachers and students, when students actively participate in setting up the "rules" of the game. Students teams win the game by having very low rates of disturbing, disruptive, destructive, or inattentive behaviors. The teacher must respond to such problematic behaviors neutrally and unemotionally, and the person who committed the breach is not called out or given "consequences." Rather, the team has a point against it, not the individual. Teams who have less than a criterion of low points, win—typically less than 4 per team.