Self-Monitoring Helps in Class While It Is in Use

What the research found

A pupil works at an ordinary classroom assignment with an audiotape playing quietly nearby. The tape sounds a tone at irregular intervals, and at each tone the pupil stops, looks at a card on the desk, and answers the one question printed on it: was I paying attention? The answer is marked in a column, on task or off task, and the work resumes. Over successive sessions the tape and the card are withdrawn, and the pupil is expected to put the question to himself without being prompted.

None of that is new. The package comes from a teaching tutorial by Hallahan and Hudson at the University of Virginia, and versions of it have circulated in special education classrooms for years. What Mir Mahmoud Mirnasab of the University of Tabriz and Bagher Ghobari Bonab of the University of Tehran did, in a case report published in the Iranian Journal of Psychiatry in 2011, was run it with four children and watch what followed.

The four attended two elementary special education schools in Iran and were between nine and eleven years old. All had been diagnosed with ADHD by a child psychiatrist, three with the combined type and one with the hyperactive-impulsive type.

Inattentive behaviour was defined by what an observer could see: not attending to the teacher or the materials, not following an instruction through, leaving the seat. The researcher sat in the classroom and recorded it directly, twice a week, thirty minutes at a time, timing how long each episode lasted and converting the total into a percentage of the session. A second observer watching alongside agreed with the first 78 percent of the time, which is modest for observational work of this kind.

The design was a multiple baseline, meaning each pupil serves as his own comparison. Behaviour is recorded for a stretch before anything changes, the procedure begins at a different point for each child, and when the behaviour shifts each time only after that point, the staggered timing argues against coincidence.

Off-task behaviour fell from baseline to the intervention phase for all four pupils. The report gives no percentages, no test statistics and no effect sizes, so the size of that fall cannot be recovered from the text. What the authors state plainly is that the gains were hard to keep: the improvement belonged to the phases in which the procedure was running, and not to the phases after the tape and the card had been withdrawn.

What four pupils can establish

A single-subject experiment answers a narrow question well. Did this behaviour change, in this child, at the moment this procedure began? It cannot answer the question a randomised trial is built for, which is whether children who receive a procedure do better on average than comparable children who do not. That requires many participants, allocated by chance to one condition or the other, and ideally observers who do not know which condition they are watching. Four pupils in two schools, recorded by a researcher who knew exactly what had been introduced and when, is weaker evidence for anyone asking whether the technique works in general.

The report is also inconsistent with itself. Its results section describes follow-up levels close to those during the intervention and below baseline, most clearly for the first and fourth pupils, while the discussion concludes that the effects were not maintained over an extended period. Without the underlying figures a reader cannot adjudicate, and the authors’ own conclusion is the safer of the two to rely on.

What survives a study this small is the description more reliably than the result. Self-monitoring of attention has a defined shape: an external prompt, a fixed question, a recorded answer, and a planned withdrawal of the prompt. A school that says it is trying self-monitoring can be asked which of those parts is actually in place, and on what schedule the prompt is being faded, since fading is where this report ran into difficulty.

The timescale is the part most easily underestimated. Sessions were thirty minutes, twice a week, and across those sessions the habit did not survive the removal of the tone. Mirnasab and Ghobari Bonab draw two conclusions of their own: that treatment needs to continue rather than stop at the end of a brief programme, and that children differ in how readily they take to a technique at all. Why the gains faded is not a question four pupils can settle.

Which leaves the ordinary situation of a parent whose child’s classroom is running some version of this. The honest unit of measurement is months.