Faculty Bibliography

The authors describe "collaborative problem solving," a cognitive-behavioral approach for working with aggressive children and adolescents. The model conceptualizes aggressive behavior as the byproduct of lagging cognitive skills in the domains of flexibility, frustration tolerance, and problem solving. The goal is to train staff to assess specific cognitive skills that may be contributing to challenging behavior and to teach children new skills through collaborative problem solving. The authors present results from an inpatient unit that dramatically reduced rates of seclusion and restraint.

A 15-year longitudinal study of 369 children originally classified in second grade as exhibiting or not exhibiting behaviors commonly associated with attention deficit disorder was made. Diagnostic data were collected on these children in second, fourth, and fifth grades and subsequent school performance was evaluated after ninth and twelfth grades. Interviews were conducted 3 years after their graduation from high school. The ninth and twelfth grade records reveal that those who had previously been identified as showing behavior related to attention deficit disorder later performed significantly more poorly in school and had poorer social adjustment. Interviews in early adulthood continued to reveal differences in outcome between normal subjects and those earlier classified as having attention deficit disorder. Many of these differences could not be directly attributed to poor academic performance. A subgroup of students who were rated favorably by their elementary school teachers were found to perform better during high school than other members of the normal group in academic areas, but they generally did not differ from normal subjects in nonacademic areas.