Browsing by Author "Salo, Katja"

Objectives. Challenging behavior or behavioral challenges among students are commonplace in schools. Various behavioral challenges, which manifest in many different ways including violent behavior, adversely affect the classroom atmosphere and learning. Because challenging behavior is prevalent in primary schools, solutions need to be found. This master's thesis examines how the quality of intervention studies influencing the behavior challenges of primary school-aged children. Specifically, I focus on intervention studies aimed at positively impacting students' behavior through the actions of classroom adults. Methods. This research was conducted as a systematic literature review. The search material was from the Helsinki University Library's advanced search function, logged in with Helsinki University credentials. Six interventions out of eighteen were evaluated that met the criteria. The method used for quality assessment was the Effective Public Health Practice Project (EPHPP), originally developed for use in healthcare, which guides the examination of research in various domains. The EPHPP method is suitable for assessing the quality of intervention studies conducted in special education. Results and conclusions. As a main result, is concluded that the reporting quality of intervention studies varies. Selection bias, study design, data collection methods and withdrawals and drop-outs were reported as strong or moderate in all intervention studies evaluated using the EPHPP method. In intervention studies, there was variation in the confounders from weak to strong. Additionally, the observation was made that the blinding of intervention studies varied in quality from weak to moderate. As a result of the analysis, two out of six intervention studies were rated overall as strong, and three intervention studies were rated as moderate. One study was rated overall as weak because EPHPP was not the best method for evaluating this intervention.