Maintenance

Description

A primary focus of the field of education is identifying effective procedures for changing a broad range of academic, social, and vocational behaviors. Accompanying this focus is a concern that desired changes in behavior will be maintained after instructional support is withdrawn. Although many educational interventions have demonstrated short-term effects, their efficacy at producing long-term, durable effects is less consistent. The true test of the effectiveness of most educational interventions is whether behaviors acquired by students will be maintained after an intervention has ceased.

Maintenance refers to the persistence of behavior over time after instruction, support, behavioral contingencies, or educational programs are withdrawn. A behavior can be said to be maintained if, after being acquired by an individual, improved performance continues over time after instructional support is discontinued. References to maintenance in the literature include response maintenance, resistance to extinction, behavioral persistence, and durability.

Maintenance is distinguished from generalization (e.g., across behaviors, persons, settings, stimuli) by its focus on performance in the future. That is, generalization across other dimensions typically is evaluated during implementation of an intervention, while maintenance is evaluated when an intervention is lessened or discontinued. Of course, educators should be concerned with whether behavior is maintained over time and if it generalizes to other persons, settings, or situations. For example, teachers not only want their students to maintain valuable reading skills in their classroom throughout the entire school year; they also want those reading skills to be used in other classrooms, with other teachers, and across other subject areas.

Performance maintenance is important in the field of education for several reasons. First, most educational programs and interventions are delivered on a timelimited basis, although students are expected to continue performing newly acquired behavior long after an intervention has ceased. For example, a mathematics unit addressing multiplication skills may be implemented over a 6-week period. Students are expected not only to demonstrate that they have acquired the skill of multiplying single-digit numbers at the conclusion of the unit but that they can maintain the skill throughout the remainder of their school career (and beyond). Second, most educational programming arranges skills in a hierarchy of simpler to increasingly complex skills. Because simpler academic concepts are often prerequisite to the mastery of other, more complex concepts, students' performance of prerequisite skills must be maintained if students are to be expected to acquire more complex skills. When students fail to perform previously learned behaviors, additional time must be expended to reteach these skills. Third, maintaining performance of academic, social, and vocational behaviors long after instruction has ended can greatly enhance a person's independence. Young adults who maintain skills they acquired during school, such as completing job applications, may be less [Page 1390]dependent on external assistance from others after leaving high school.

Research Basis

The empirical literature clearly indicates that desired behavior change typically is not maintained without efforts to sustain it. Often, when an intervention is withdrawn, behaviors revert to levels approximating preintervention or baseline levels. For example, students may decrease their off-task behavior when a token economy is implemented in a classroom. Upon elimination of the token economy, however, students may gradually begin to look around the room, play with task materials, or get out of their seats.

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