Negative Impact of Noncompliance with Instructions

2798 Words6 Pages

Noncompliance with instructions is one of the most pervasive childhood problems for which professional help or behavioral treatment is sought. (Bernal, Klinnert, & Schultz, 1980; Miles & Wilder, 2009). Noncompliance is defined as the failure to follow an instruction within a specified time period. Noncompliance with instructions is common in preschool settings (Crowther, Bond, & Rolf, 1981) with prevalence of noncompliance among children estimated to be between 8% and 65% (Kalb & Loeber, 2003; Rodriguez, Thompson, & Baynham, 2010).
Noncompliance has several negative impacts on an individual. Firstly, noncompliance to requests or instructions can hinder a child from learning. This is especially so for children who engages in noncompliance behaviours maintained by escape. A child’s learning will be affected if he is often out of the class, taking away opportunities for him to learn new skills. Thus, compliance with teacher instructions in classroom settings is critical for effective learning (Martens & Kelly, 1993). In addition, noncompliance affects social skills development as the child may learn to engage in inappropriate behaviours to gain attention or escape from demand. These inappropriate behaviours may in turn affect positive social interactions with his peers and teachers. Secondly, noncompliance also limits access to potential job opportunities, especially for growing individuals with learning and developmental disabilities. Ability to comply to instructions and requests from supervisor is a necessary skill required of an employee. In addition, noncompliance are often made worse when individuals engage in aggression or self-injurious behaviours to escape from demands. Noncompliance, coupled with inappropriate behaviours, ...

... middle of paper ...

...epeated pairing or exposure to consequence-based procedures such as extinction. That is, consistent exposure to extinction or other consequence-based interventions may establish high-p instructions as discriminative stimuli for compliance (Wilder, Allison, Nicholson, Abellon, & Saulnier, 2010). Lastly, while the studies presented established the effectiveness of positive reinforcement on noncompliance, it will be of interest to find out if there are conditions in which positive reinforcement contingencies are not as effective. For example, it may be less effective when given a more difficult or highly aversive tasks. In addition, most of the research conducted has used edible reinforcers, so future research should attempt to determine the effects of other positive reinforcers on escape-maintained problem behavior. Future research could examine these possibilities.

Open Document