UF Researchers: Anger Management Should Join Academics In Classroom

July 18, 2002

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — School children should receive classroom instruction in anger management just as they do in reading, writing and arithmetic, University of Florida researchers say.

A new study finds that classroom harmony improves when all youngsters, not just well-known troublemakers, are taught how to control their outbursts, said Stephen Smith, a UF special education professor.

“Kids who are chronically disruptive or aggressive in the classroom take up a lot of teacher time,” he said. “That’s time the teacher doesn’t have to give to all the kids in the room who are behaving and doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Smith and UF colleagues Ann Daunic and David Miller designed a 20-lesson anger management curriculum and tested it on 200 fourth and fifth graders in six elementary schools in Alachua and Bradford counties. Two years into the three-year multistage study of disruptive children and their better-mannered classmates, the researchers have found the lessons lead to improvements in all kids, according to an article to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Social Psychology.

“Teachers tell us disruptive and aggressive behavior is their No. 1 problem,” said Daunic, a UF special education researcher. “The kids are coming in with more and more challenging behaviors all the time, and these are kids in regular education classrooms – they’ve not been identified for special ed.”

Children with severely challenging behaviors, along with those who have learning, developmental or physical disabilities, are typically referred for special education. This kind of training could fall under the broader categories of violence prevention and character education, both gaining importance in current views of elementary education priorities, she said.

The researchers said the simple fact that anger management is given the status of a classroom subject for all students makes a strong impression on children.

“When all kids get the instruction, there is a realization throughout the classroom that it’s important,” Smith said. “Not only do kids who are chronically disruptive start to act more like their well-behaving peers, but knowledge of problem-solving skills increases dramatically for everyone.”

The lessons are a preventative measure aimed at helping children develop the mind-set to avoid trouble, much like adults learn to suppress their reactions to being bumped in a crowd or cut off in traffic, he said.

“Kids who are highly disruptive in classrooms may not have a mental framework from which to operate,” he said. “They may have only one response to being called a name and it may be verbally or physically aggressive, such as pushing or shoving or even threatening someone.”

The program encourages students to generate a variety of solutions instead of impulsively lashing out, he said. For example, they might stop and analyze the situation, make a statement that they don’t like to be called names, or ignore it and tell the teacher later, Smith said.

The goal is to develop a mental plan – a step-by-step procedure that eventually becomes automatic – that allows children to come up with appropriate responses to whatever situation they face, he said.

“The laymen’s way of thinking of it is problem solving,” he said. “Most adults probably go through it on a daily basis over and over throughout their day as they encounter certain situations.” If they have never learned how to do this through modeling or explicit instruction, however, children may automatically resort to impulsive or aggressive actions, he said.

Before and after the study curriculum was taught, teachers rated each student in their class using two standardized testing scales assessing general behavioral and aggression. Each student also completed a measure of anger disposition and expression as part of the study, which was supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Teacher ratings of students identified initially as having the worst behavior showed significant improvement on both aggression subscales, making them more like their well-behaved classmates, Smith said. Students’ ratings of their own anger control also showed a slight improvement, he said.

The lessons were given last fall to students that teachers identified as having behavioral problems, as well as to so-called “typical” students. Both groups increased their knowledge of problem-solving strategies within a five- to eight-week time frame, maintaining it when tested five months later, he said.

In both cases, scores on a problem-solving questionnaire improved significantly, as opposed to those of a control group of students who had not received the training, he said.

“We’re really talking about prevention, which is a big word in education now,” Daunic said. By incorporating anger management courses into the curriculum, schools not only would be able to prevent behavioral problems from disrupting classes, they would avoid the need to remove unruly students from regular classrooms and place them in special education, she said.