Our first behavioral strategy was an interactive skit on the importance of impulse control, where we act out two scenarios and the children choose the responses. This interactive skit was conducted in Session 1. The behavioral principle behind this strategy is modelling as we will act out the correct response to the scenarios, which is to avoid distractions and they will learn from our actions.
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Our second behavioral strategy was a game named "Don't Touch That!", which is an obstacle course game with three stages of increasing difficulty played in Session 2. The behavioral principle behind this strategy is token economy. The children were awarded tokens for every level of the obstacle course game they completed within the amount of time given (1 min 30s). At the end of the session, the child with the most tokens was given priority to choose the reward, which is stickers.
BEHAVIORAL STRATEGIES & PRINCIPLES APPLED
EFFECTIVENESS OF STRATEGIES
The participants learnt what we intended to let them learn, which is the importance of impulse control in Session 1 and the ways to focus in Session 2. During the debrief of Session 1, it can be seen from the responses the children given that each of them managed to learn at least one importance of impulse control. As for Session 2, we gave out questionnaire to let them list two ways of focusing and the children managed to write down the ways we taught as well.
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Both modelling and token economy were effective in teaching the children. At the end of Session 1, the children remembered our actions acted out during the interactive skit, which include saying no to friends asking you out when you have work to do and politely asking friends to stop distracting you when studying. One of them even practiced it by asking her friend to stop distracting her while we were teaching them the importance of impulse control. Hence, this shows that modelling was an effective behavioral principle. As for token economy, it can be seen that it was effective in getting the children to participate in the game and learn not to get distracted. One of the girls was reluctant to join in the game but when she heard that they get a reward based on the token system, she actively participated in the game and at the end of the game, she learnt that staying focus and avoiding distractions when doing a task is important.
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POSSIBLE CHANGES IN FUTURE PROJECTS
In future programmes, I would plan to have more scenarios for interactive skits as it is a fun yet effective way to teach children what we want them to learn and have more scenarios will allow the children to have more time to learn, understand and digest the importance of impulse control through our actions to avoid distractions during the skit. Also, instead of using only stickers as a reward for the token economy, I can include other rewards in future programmes, like stationery, cards etc, so that there is more variety in rewards, to ensure that all children will be motivated to actively participate in the activity.