Data Collection

Daily Data Collection Sheets

Daily data collection sheets were done every thirty minutes every day to track my students behaviors. On the daily data collection sheets, it tracked elopement, verbal disruption, physical aggression, and physical disruption. These data collection sheets allowed me to keep track of my students behavior everyday to see if the token economy reward system was effective. These data collection sheets also helped me to make decisions based on how many tokens my students should be earning to get their reward. When looking at the data sheets each day, for example, when I looked at Student one's data at the end of one day, I noticed that he was making consistent growth each day. As a result of noticing the growth, I increased the amount tokens that the student was earning from four tokens to five.

Pre-Test/ Post-Test

A pretest and a post-test were done in order to see how much growth there was over the entire study. A pretest was taken on the very first day of the study and a post test was taken on the last day of the study. They both were taken on the students behavior over the entire day. These were both done on the daily data sheets that were also used to collect data during this study.

Teaching Strategies GOLD Data from Fall to Winter

Teaching Strategies GOLD is an authentic, ongoing observational system for assessing children from birth through kindergarten. It helps teachers to observe children in the context of everyday experiences, which is an effective way to learn what they know and can do. Each student has a certain color band that they are to be in by the time they turn the next age. I collected data based on the student's fall and winter data points. This helped me to know if there was any improvement in the particular areas that I was monitoring during this study. The particular areas that I was monitoring included: Managing feelings, following limits and expectations, balancing the needs and rights of themselves and others, and solving social problems within the classroom. This data helped me to know if my students were making progress towards meeting these goals.

Daily Observations

Daily observations were also used in order to decide how many tokens would be effective for each student. Daily observations allowed me to make informed decisions quickly and do what was best for each one of my students to be successful. For example, when I noticed that a student was not earning tokens quickly enough to improve behavior, I decreased the amount of tokens he was earning, so it would help his behavior to improve. In these daily observations, I noted how many awards were earned each day. This helped me to make the best decision about giving my students more tokens to earn.