Classroom Management Research Improving Student Success

The award-winning University of Houston Consistency Management and Cooperative Discipline (CMCD) program, part of the College of Education, received a $3.5 million grant from the Institute of Education Science (IES), which is the research branch of the U.S. Department of Education.

The purpose is to study how CMCD strategies affect the behavior and achievement of more than 31,000 Houston-area elementary students.

Jerome Freiberg, a UH John and Rebecca Moores Endowed professor and director of CMCD, says the program is expected to decrease student office disciplinary referrals and increase student learning by fostering student personal responsibility, which leads to greater self-discipline.

The program teaches research-based, school-tested classroom management strategies that forge positive teacher-student relationships, create organized learning environments, improve instruction and cooperatively establish classroom discipline procedures.

The grant will fund a four-year study of the CMCD’s effectiveness in classrooms of 30 elementary schools in the Aldine Independent School District. The program will focus on third and fourth grade, an important time period for intervention, as experiences during these developmental stages often are indicators of future student success.

For the first two years of the study, half the teachers will receive CMCD intervention training and coaching support and half will follow established practices. The reverse is implemented in the third and fourth years of the study. UH Professors David Francis and Coleen Carlson of the UH Texas Institute for Measurement, Evaluation and Statistics (TIMES) are co-investigators on the study and will conduct evaluations.