Optimizing Classroom and School Impact of the Pax Good Behavior Game

The good behavior game (GBG) is one of most replicated behavior-change strategies across cultures in the scientific literature. When the early randomized efficacy trials by researchers at Johns Hopkins University were first undertaken, the GBG was being implemented in 10 classrooms in 1986, and as the PAX GBG has emerged from research at Hopkins and elsewhere, the GBG in 2017 is in over 10,000 classrooms. This presentation highlights the replicable, scientific processes used to achieve large-scale implementation from precision prevention science, including:

• Acting to isolate “active ingredients’, whose benefits that can be separately and measured via multiple-base or reversal designs as a way of optimizing implementation and targeted behavior change among adults and children.
• Scaffolding a cascade of intrinsic reinforcers for the prevention targets, proximal implementers and institutional settings.
• Developing automatic feedback loops for successes and adjustments if progress sub-optimal.
• Mapping the relation frames (language, regulatory context), antecedents, behaviors and consequences for each nested unit of humans involved in the chain of events required for adoption, implementation, and maintenance.
• Designing and testing solutions for common difficulties for adoption, implementation, and maintenance, which includes issues of manufacturing, delivery and other logistics.
• Building a monitoring system for population-level impact for improvement, policy and sustainability.
• Creating an economic model for development, refinement and dissemination beyond grant funding.

Each step of the way involved variation and selection based on proximal results in a complex chain reaction of behaviors involving teachers, students, other adults in the building, families, community supports for sustainability and funders. Only a few prevention programs have a rich history of sustainable scale, which this presentation will touch on for comparative learning and richness. While there are specifics for GBG as a prevention program, the lessons learned represent an inducted pathway that other proven or promising universal prevention strategies might adapt for achieving broader impact of proven prevention science.