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What each man knows is, in an important sense, dependent upon his own individual experience: he knows what he has seen and heard, what he has read and what he has been told, and also what, from these data, he has been able to infer. (Bertrand Russell)

In order that an important invention may be successful, two conditions must be favorable. First: It must be possible, that is, the scientific principle on which it is to be founded must be known. Second: The invention must be wanted. (Henry, 1886)

This study examined the effects of personal accountability and personal responsibility instructional treatments on elementary-age, urban, at-risk physical education students. A multiple treatment ABAD, ACAD, ADA, control behavior analysis design was implemented across four distinct matched class settings to determine the separate and combined treatment effects of each instructional treatment on the number of occurrences and percentage of class time for the following: teacher management, student leadership, passive and disruptive student off-task, positive social behavior, and student conflict and conflict resolution behaviors. Study participants included fourth- and fifth-grade students from four elementary classes in an inner-city charter-school setting. Results indicated that both personal accountability and personal responsibility treatments were effective in the primary treatment setting for changing all managerial, off-task, and positive social measures in desirable directions. Recommendations include analysis of the potential long-range and generalized effects of social-skill instruction for underserved children and youth conducted in the context of physical education classes.

This study, conducted within an undergraduate Methods of Teaching Physical Education and School-Based Practice Teaching course, used an AB maintenance-across-participants design to (a) sequentially describe preservice teachers’ (N = 4) instructional interactions with students, (b) examine the effects of sequential feedback on the sequential nature of preservice teachers’ instructional interactions with students, and (c) assess the influence of differential sequential preservice teacher instructional interactions on student skill practice. Instructional interaction sequential data indicated that explicit teacher instruction and refinement were sequentially connected to student-appropriate skill practice, while general teacher instruction was sequentially connected to student-inappropriate skill practice. The data indicated that the sequential feedback protocol (a) consistently increased the incidence of refinement and explicit instruction within preservice teacher sequential instructional interactions for all participants, and (b) preservice teacher sequential pattern changes positively influenced the incidence of student-appropriate skill practice. This study also supports a strong relationship between explicit instruction and refinement and student-appropriate skill practice. Implications for further research into the sequential behavior determinants of the teaching and learning process in situational context are discussed last.