Effectiveness of Response Cost and Time out in Decreasing Lateness Among Senior Secondary School Students in Jigawa State, Nigeria

Abstract

Disturbed by incessant display of school lateness among senior secondary school students in Jigawa state, and in response to the failure of conventional punitive punishment procedures of whipping and hard labour in stopping this unhealthy behaviour and in an effort to provide and test the efficacy of alternative behaviour modification methods. This research investigates effectiveness of response cost and time-out in decreasing lateness. The study adopts pre-test post-test procedure using 32 randomly selected public secondary schools. Four weeks? average percentage of lateness in relation to total school enrolment was checked and recorded using school lateness checklist. Thereafter treatment of response cost was administered in 12 schools and time-out was administered in another set of 12 schools. In both instances results analysed using t.test for related samples revealed a p.value of 0.00 at 0.05 level of significance suggesting rejection of null hypotheses for the emergence of significant difference (decrease in lateness) instrumented by treatment with response cost and time-out respectively. The third hypothesis predicting significant difference in the effectiveness of response cost and time-out was retained as p.vaue was found to be 0.89, LS 0.05. Among other things, use of response cost and time-out behaviour modification strategies in senior secondary school schools was recommended