Student Classroom Misbehavior: An Exploratory Study Based on Teachers' Perceptions

Rachel C F Sun,Daniel T L Shek

doi:10.1100/2012/208907

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the conceptions of junior secondary school student misbehaviors in classroom, and to identify the most common, disruptive, and unacceptable student problem behaviors from teachers' perspective. Twelve individual interviews with teachers were conducted. A list of 17 student problem behaviors was generated. Results showed that the most common and disruptive problem behavior was talking out of turn, followed by nonattentiveness, daydreaming, and idleness. The most unacceptable problem behavior was disrespecting teachers in terms of disobedience and rudeness, followed by talking out of turn and verbal aggression. The findings revealed that teachers perceived student problem behaviors as those behaviors involving rule-breaking, violating the implicit norms or expectations, being inappropriate in the classroom settings and upsetting teaching and learning, which mainly required intervention from teachers.

Highlights

Student misbehaviors such as disruptive talking, chronic avoidance of work, clowning, interfering with teaching activities, harassing classmates, verbal insults, rudeness to teacher, defiance, and hostility [1], ranging from infrequent to frequent, mild to severe, is a thorny issue in everyday classroom
Research findings have shown that school misbehavior escalated with time and lowered academic achievement and increased delinquent behavior [6, 7]
To lessen these immediate and gradual adverse effects of student misbehaviors, it is of primary importance to identify what exactly are these behaviors inside classroom

Summary

Introduction

Student misbehaviors such as disruptive talking, chronic avoidance of work, clowning, interfering with teaching activities, harassing classmates, verbal insults, rudeness to teacher, defiance, and hostility [1], ranging from infrequent to frequent, mild to severe, is a thorny issue in everyday classroom.Teachers usually reported that these disturbing behaviors in the classroom are intolerable [2] and stress-provoking [3], and they had to spend a great deal of time and energy to manage the classroom [4, 5]. Daydreaming in class, not completing homework, talking in class, lesson disruption, bullying, and rudeness to the teacher are named as “problem behaviors” [9], “behavior problems,” [10, 11] or “disruptive behaviors” [4, 12]. These behaviors referred to “an activity that causes distress for teachers, interrupts the learning process and that leads teachers to make continual comments to the student” [13, page

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