Evaluating the Impact of a Modified Positive Greetings at the Door Strategy on Class-Wide and Individual Student Behaviors

Class-wide student disruptive behaviors continue to be a growing concern that often interferes with academic instruction (Griffiths et al., 2019; McKissick et al., 2010). Antecedent interventions, often delivered at the Tier 1 level, provide teachers with the opportunity to proactively set the occasion for students to engage in desired behaviors (Kruger et al., 2019). A promising antecedent, Tier 1 intervention that has been found to successfully increase class-wide prosocial behaviors is Positive Greetings at the Door (PGD) (Cook et al., 2018; Lawson et al., under review). Despite research evaluating the impact of personalized greetings with students at a Tier 2 level, the PGD literature has not evaluated the effects of PGD on specific students who display higher levels of disruptive behaviors compared to their peers. Thus, using a concurrent multiple baseline design across classrooms, the current study expanded PGD by training teachers to deliver a personalized check-in and a pre-corrective statement to three target students. Overall, results indicated that PGD+ increased students’ academically engaged behaviors (AEB) and decreased disruptive behavior at the class-wide level and target student level. Implications and future directions of the study are discussed.