He recorded each childs preferences in a notebook and

He recorded each child’s preferences in a
notebook and planned to incorporate
these into his group contingency.
Developing a Group Contingency
System
Once teachers have completed child
observations, they are ready to develop
the intervention. This entails choosing
a type of group contingency,
composing a contingency statement,
designing a contingency system, and
developing a child training.
Type of Group Contingency
The first step is choosing the type of
contingency: independent or
interdependent. This decision is based
on a few factors, including group size,
teacher availability for data tracking
and reinforcement, and teacher
preference. In small groups of children,
it is possible for teachers to track each
child’s behavior individually and
reinforce each based on his or her
performance (an independent group
contingency), but this can be difficult
with a whole class. In this case, an
interdependent contingency might be
more feasible. Similarly, teachers can
think of the behavior and how
important it is that each child perform
it or if the focus instead is on children
accomplishing a goal as a group. For
some children, behavior might improve
if they learn their behavior impacts
their peers (Popkin & Skinner, 2003).
Contingency Statement
Next, teachers will develop a group
contingency statement that describes
each of the five essential components
of the contingency: the target behavior,
the desired level of behavior, children
requiring intervention, context, and
postsession reinforcement. This
statement will drive the intervention.
For example, the following statement
includes each required component: “If
every student puts away his or her
pencil at the end of math instruction,
the class will earn a preferred group
activity.”
Contingency System
Once the type of contingency is
selected, the contingency system is
developed. Because the system is based
on the components in the contingency
statement, it will be unique to each
intervention. During this step, teachers
will develop a visual tracking system,
select reinforcers, and choose a data
collection system.
First, teachers will develop a visual
tracking system that displays child
progress toward earning the
postsession reinforcement and provides
immediate reinforcement for engaging
in target behavior. Although group
contingencies can be conducted
without one, children are more
successful with a visual tracking
system in place (Maggin et al., 2012;
Pokorski et al., 2017). Ideally, this
system will be easy for teachers to use
and visually appealing to children. For
instance, in an independent group
contingency, a token board with
children’s pictures or symbols might be
used (such as in Figure 2). In Figure 2,
the light yellow circles are token
placeholders (which attach with Velcro,
Figure 2. Independent group contingency

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as pictured by white dots in center),
and the gold circles are earned tokens.