School behavior of first grade children identified as at-risk for development of conduct problems.

This paper describes the implementation of a direct observation procedure with first grade children identified as at-risk for the development of conduct disorders. Children were identified as high-risk or low-risk at kindergarten using a three-stage screening process. Stage one consisted of identifying kindergarten classrooms lo cated in schools with reportedly high rates of behavior problems; stage two used kindergarten teachers' reports of school readiness; and stage three involved par ents' ratings of their children's behavior at home. Subjects were assessed 15 months later in the first grade during both structured and unstructured activities using behavioral observation and obsen/ers' impressions. Results of this study suggest that children identified as high-risk at kindergarten demonstrate difficulties one year later in their interactions with teachers and peers when compared to a low-risk group. Interpretation of results and future research in this area are pre sented. Early identification of children at-risk for conduct disorders has become an important topic in the area of behavioral disorders. The goal of this study was to describe the school behavior of first grade students identified as at either highor low-risk for conduct disorders by ob serving their teacher and peer interactive behavior one year after initial identification. As noted by Reid and Patterson (1991), patterns of antisocial behavior are often formed in early social development. Display of deviant behavior at an early age is often predictive of social maladjustment later in life (Patterson, Capaldi, & Bank, 1991). Among the reported outcomes related to early antisocial behavior is an increased risk for being referred to men tal health agencies for diagnosis and treatment (Patterson, 1982; Reid, Baldwin, Patterson, & Dishion, 1982; Robins, 1979). For schoolage children, outcomes include referral for spe cial education services, usually in the area of serious emotional disturbance (Kauffman, 1989). At the school level, Ruhl and Hughes (1985) reported that aggressive and noncom pliant behaviors often result in the student being referred for school-based counseling, placed in more restrictive environments, or being suspended from school activities. At the interpersonal level, children displaying antisocial behavior are often rejected by their peers and are likely to engage in only short episodes of positive interactions (Coie & Kupersmidt, 1983; Dodge, 1983; Dodge, Coie, & Brakke, 1982). Beginning with Robins (1966), considerable effort has been made to identify predictors of chronic antisocial outcomes. Numerous studies have identified scores of significant relations between home, school, and community variables and the development of antisocial behav ior (e.g., Patterson & Bank, 1986; West & Farrington, 1973). From this literature, social and economic disadvantage, parenting behavior, and early oppositional behaviors have been identified as the major risk factors related to later conduct disorders (Kazdin, 1987). These predictors are often correlated with dysfunctional performances in school adjustment, specif ically in the areas of teacher-pupil relationships and peer social interactions (Kazdin, 1985; Wahler & Dumas, 1986; Walker, McConnell, & Clarke, 1984; Walker et al, 1988). By identify *Members of the Conduct Disorders Prevention Research Group are (alphabetically): Karen Bierman, John D. Coie, Kenneth A. Dodge, Mark Greenberg, John E. Lochman, and Robert McMahon. Preparation of this manuscript was funded in part by NIMH Grant No. MH4S043. The authors acknowledge the coop eration of the teachers and pupils of the Metro Nashville School System, and the assistance of Joan Deer, Jilah Kalil, Lisa Love, Emma Dickinson, Diane Seay, and Annette Smith for data collection. Behavioral Disorders November 1993 [Vol. 19 No. 1 67-78] 67 This content downloaded from 207.46.13.21 on Tue, 27 Sep 2016 03:53:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ing children who exhibit these behaviors both at home and school, it is hypothesized that we are identifying students who are at greatest risk for exhibiting later maladjustment. Traditional assessment procedures for conduct disorders have long been a major source of dissatisfaction among educators (Kauffman, 1989; Wood, 1987). The ambiguous and subjective nature of current methods has led to the underidentification of children at-risk for conduct disorders (Kauffman, 1989; Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders [CCBD], 1989). In order to identify these children more accurately and efficiently, Loeber, Dishion, and Patterson (1984) have advocated the use of a multiple-gating assessment procedure. According to Walker et al. (1988), "multiple-gating is a procedure that consists of a series of progressively more precise assessments or gates that provide for the sequential assess ment and cross-validation of multimethod forms of child assessment and that establish a de cision-making structure for the aggregation of information produced by different assessment sources" (p.10). During the screening process, children who meet the criterion for risk at a particular gate move ahead to the next stage of assessment. Those children who do not meet criterion at any gate are placed into a nonrisk sample. Thus, from a multiple-gating perspective, two distinct populations are identified within a locale: those children who meet criterion at each stage of assessment and are most at-risk for the development of conduct disorders, and those children in the nonrisk sample who are representative of different lev els of behavioral risk in the same communities (Loeber et al, 1984). In this study, three gates were used to identify high-risk children. The first gate was the identification of schools with known high rates of school dropout and behavior problems; the second gate was teacher evaluation of child behavior; and the third gate was maternal re port of behavior at home. To date, several studies have utilized multiple-gating assessment procedures to identify children at-risk for conduct disorders. The most significant work in this area has been con ducted by Patterson and his colleagues at the Oregon Social Learning Center, including the Patterson and Bank (1986) study of family interactions and development of antisocial be havior. Using a multiple-gating assessment of familial characteristics, two cohorts of fourth grade boys were placed into at-risk or normative control samples. Assessment of these co horts in school environments (fifth grade) indicated that the multiple-gating process was suc cessful in discriminating between these two groups of children. In general, the at-risk sam ples engaged in fewer appropriate academic behaviors, displayed higher rates of negative behavior, were the targets of more peer-directed negative behavior, and were documented as having more serious disciplinary problems than the normative control sample (Shinn, Ramsey, Walker, Stieber, & O'Neill, 1987; Walker et al, 1988). Data from the Patterson and Bank (1986) samples suggest that by fourth grade, patterns of antisocial behavior are beginning to emerge in high-risk children. However, there exists evidence that development of deviant patterns of behavior occurs much earlier. As noted by Patterson et al. (1991), a significant number of boys begin their antisocial behaviors be tween ages 4 to 9 years. These "early starters" are more likely to be identified as problem children in the elementary grades and are probably most at-risk for adult psychopathology. Unfortunately, the research in this area has often been confined to differences between highand low-risk samples in later elementary grades (i.e., fourth grade and beyond). It is not clear if these differences in teacher-pupil interactions and peer relations exist at the onset of formal education (i.e., first grade). There is evidence that differences do exist in the social-cognitive behavior of aggressive young children (Dodge, Bates, & Pettit, 1990; Dodge, Pettit, McClaskey, & Brown, 1986); however, the extent to which these differences are manifested in peer interactions at the school level has not been observed. The purpose of this study was to describe the classroom behavior of first grade children identified as at-risk for developing conduct disorders in order to determine if differences exist in teacher-pupil interactions and peer relationships when compared to a low-risk sample.