Classroom interaction: Two studies of severely educationally subnormal children

Abstract

An experimental study of go/no-go discrimination learning had previously indicated that individual differences in learning relate to childrens’ scores on the excitation/inhibition factor of a classroom assessment scale. The current paper reports two observational studies which show that this scale factor also relates to aspects of the children's classroom behaviour. In particular, the frequency of initiation of interaction, amount of speech, number of approaches and likelihood of interacting with the teacher, were positively and significantly related to the degree of excitation of the children. These results were interpreted as indicating that excitable children are more reinforcement seeking than inhabitable children, and that this tendency leads to the differences observed in the classroom.