ABSTRACT

The behavioural approach to teaching is now beginning to offer an important contribution to current educational practice in Britain. Since the early 1970s, inspired by the pioneering work of North Americans such as Becker and Madsen, British educational psychologists (both ‘pure’ and ‘applied’) have been researching and developing appropriate behavioural methods for use in mainstream British schools. Among the early ‘enthusiasts’ were Presland, first in the West Midlands and later in Wiltshire, Berger and Yule in London, Ward in Manchester, Harrop and McNamara in the North West and our own ‘Birmingham Group’ (Wheldall, Merrett and associated students) in the West Midlands. Since much of the earlier work was carried out in special schools for client groups with manifest handicaps, it is not perhaps surprising that initial attempts to use behavioural methods in mainstream schools were often characterized by the use of rather intrusive intervention strategies, cheerfully referred to as ‘behaviour mod’