Good Behavior Game

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a classroom management strategy designed to improve aggressive/disruptive classroom behavior and prevent later criminality. The program is universal and can be applied to general populations of early elementary school children, although the most significant results have been found for children demonstrating early high-risk behavior. It is implemented when children are in early elementary grades to provide them with the skills they need to respond to later, possibly negative, life experiences and societal influences.

GBG improves teachers' ability to define tasks, set rules, and discipline students and allows students to work in teams in which each individual is responsible to the rest of the group. Before the game begins, teachers clearly specify those disruptive behaviors (e.g., verbal and physical disruptions, noncompliance) that, if displayed, will result in a team's receiving a checkmark on the board. By the end of the game, teams that have not exceeded the maximum number of marks are rewarded, while teams that exceed this standard receive no rewards. Eventually, the teacher begins the game with no warning and at different periods during the day, so students are always monitoring their behavior and conforming to expectations.

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is designed to improve aggressive/disruptive classroom behavior and prevent later criminality.

The original evaluation showed that GBG had a significant impact on aggressive behavior rated by teachers for boys and girls. For boys the GBG subjects were rated less aggressive than the external control group. For girls the GBG subjects were rated less aggressive than the internal control group. The GBG had an impact for boys on aggressive behavior as nominated by peers, but it had no effect on peer nominations of aggressive behavior among girls. For both boys and girls in GBG, teacher ratings of shy behavior were significantly less than internal controls after the intervention and significantly less than external controls for girls. The 6-year follow-up produced no main effect reduction in aggression as a result of the GBG. For males with higher levels of aggression at first grade, however, there were increasing and significant effects of the GBG at sixth grade. Thus the effect of the GBG varied as a function of aggression severity.

The more recent evaluation of GBG found that at sixth grade (5 years after the intervention) the CC (GBG) intervention children were significantly less likely than control children to meet the diagnostic criteria for conduct disorder, less likely to have been suspended from school in the last year, and less likely to have received or been judged to need mental health services. Both the CC and FSP intervention children received significantly better ratings from their teachers for conduct problems than the control children. Moreover, research found evidence to suggest that the impact of the interventions was in part mediated by improvement in early risk behaviors of attention/concentration problems and shy and aggressive behavior.