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The Effects of Self-Management Training on Academic Performance

Mark R. Dean, Richard W. Malott and Barbara J. Fulton
Teaching of Psychology 1983 10: 77
DOI: 10.1207/s15328023top1002_4
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Steinberg, R. Writing the psychology paper. Woodbury, NY:

Arron's Educational Series, 1977.
Weedman, C. A guide for the preparation and evaluation of the
dissertation or thesis. San Diego, CA: Omega, 1975.

Note
Address requests for reprints to Judith S. Blanton, Dean for Academic and Professional Affairs, California School of Professional
Psychology, 1900 Addison St., Berkeley, CA 94704.

The Effects of Self-Management Training

On Academic Performance
Mark R. Dean, Richard W. Malott
and Barbara J. Fultan
Western Michigan University
Increases of one letter-grade were
obtained, and the majority of the
students continued use of the methods.
Each school year in most courses there are usually a few
students having academic difficulty, including the courses
offered through our own psychology department, and an
instructor is pressed to determine an intervention strategy to
improve the students' grades. Many factors may be responsible for this poor academic performance. For example, the
students may lack the necessary prerequisite skills for
current instructional materials (Holland, Soloman, Doran, &
Frezza, 1976, pp. 171-185), or they may not be motivated to
do well because current contingencies are weak or poorly
programmed (Skinner, 1969). Some students may need
more time than others to prepare for course examinations
and meet mastery standards (Keller, 1968), but academic
deficiencies may be prevented by an increase in studying
(see Grant & Keenan, Note 1, for a review of study behavior
in college).
Insufficient study preparation may occur for several
reasons including the following: (a) Reinforcers inherent in
the study materials may be weak and infrequent (Michael,
1974). (b) External sources of reinforcement for studying are
usually absent (Reese, 1978, pp. 54-58). (c) Test scores are
usually too delayed to effectively reward studying or to
punish insufficient studying (Malott, Tillema, & Glenn, 1978,
pp. 165-184). And, (d) reinforcers for many behaviors incompatible with studying are usually numerous and immediately available (Malott, Note 2). For these reasons, students will often postpone studying to engage in other
activities, and some students will obtain low academic
grades as a result.
One source of data useful in devising an intervention for
students having academic difficulty comes from the area of
self-management. In recent years, researchers have demonstrated that an individual may use various self-management
techniques to increase the frequency of selected behaviors
(see O'Leary & Dubey 1979; Rosenbaum & Drabman, 1979;
Jones, Nelson, & Kazdin, 1977, for review). Self-management
techniques specifically designed to increase the amount of
time a student studies have had positive results. For instance, self-monitoring and self-recording of study time
have led to increments in studying (Miller & Gimpl, 1972;
Champlin & Karoly, 1975; Tichenor, 1977), and studying

also increased when students used self-reinforcement techniques (e.g., money and special privileges) contingent upon
a predetermined amount of studying (Richards, McReynolds,
Holt, & Sexton, 1976; Greiner & Karoly, 1976).
In many of these experiments, process (i.e., study behavior) measures have been taken, but outcome (i.e., quiz
score) measures have not been taken, or if taken, have
shown no effects. The present study includes two experiments: The first experiment involves a combination of selfmanagement procedures, Including self-monitoring and
self-recording, for students having academic difficulty; the
second experiment evaluates three self-management pro-cedures, and provides an extension of the literature to
include student-constructed rule statements and environmental management as additional self-management techniques. The effectiveness of this program is evaluated on the
basis of outcome measures of the students' q u ~ zperformance.
Experiment 1
Method. Nine students elected to participate in the first
experiment after an announcement was made in their classroom explaining that, by participating, students could earn
five bonus points (out of at least 450 total course points) and
could learn useful self-management skills. The subjects
were undergraduate students enrolled in one of two psychology courses at Western Michigan University.
Quiz scores served as the dependent variable for all
subjects. The eight students enrolled in an intermediate level
psychology course took two quizzes per week, with the
remaining student enrolled in an introductory psychology
course taking three quizzes each week.
Intervention involved six independent variables in the
form of self-management procedures taught to students.
The experimental sessions followed an "AB" design replicated across subjects. Baseline quiz scores were recorded
for each student for an average of seven weeks before
self-management training began, with training sessions
scheduled across a two-week period.
The students used a notebook, called the SelfManagement Calendar (Sundberg, 1979), for all self-

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management activities. A weekly schedule form and standard graph paper were attached to the front and back
covers of the notebook for additional self-management
purposes. Training occurred during each of six one-to-one
meetings with the r e ~ e a r c h e r . ~
Meeting I . This meeting served as an opportunity for the
students to identify the most important variables that might
exert control over their studying. The students developed a
list of the following: (a) personal and career goals related to
their school work, (b) additional positive outcomes, or reinforcers, that might result if they achieved outstanding grades
in school, and (c) punishers, or undesirable outcomes, that
could result from poor academic performance. To establish
a permanent record of these variables, the students listed
them as "rule statements" using an "If-then" format, such as
"If I do this behavior, then I can expect this consequence to
follow," entering the list onto a blank page of their selfmanaqement notebook.
Meeting 2. The students received instruction in selfmonitoring and recording, performance graphing, and
schedule planning. First, for purposes of self-evaluation, the
students were instructed to begin self-monitoring on an
hourly basis, recording general activities that they engaged
in from waking to retiring each day in the appropriate hour
block of their self-management notebook. As part of this
self-recording procedure, the students totaled the number of
hours they studied each day and the number of hours they
subjectively evaluated as "wasted" (i.e., behaviors involving
neither academics nor important non-academic activities),
and listed these amounts at the bottom of each daily column.
Second, the students began to graph the number of hours
that thev studied each dav, and also began to graph the
socres that they received i n their weeklfquizzei. iinally,
they began to use a schedule form for planning hourly, daily,
and weekly activities, with special emphasis on establishing
regular and reliable study periods. Both the graph pages
and the schedule form were attached to the covers of their
self-management notebook.
Meeting 3. In order to establish stimulus surroundings
most favorable to studying, the students received instruction
in environmental management which involved the manipulation of study room conditions. During this meeting, the
students engaged in the following activities: They developed
a list of those behaviors and events that interfered with
studying, and based on this analysis, developed a list of
changes to be made in their study environment, including
both the addition of stimuli that might prompt studying and
the removal of stimuli that might set the occasion for
behaviors incompatible with studying,
Suggested additions to the study room included the
strategic posting of the students' rule statements (developed during Meeting I),weekly schedule form, and quiz or
study graphs near their desk, in such a location as to make it
most likely that they would be read when studying. Suggested items to remove included magazines, pictures, certain foods or alcohol, televison sets or stereos, and whatever
else that the students themselves had identified as discriminative stimuli for their non-studying.
Meeting 4. For general time-organization purposes, the
students received training in the self-management technique of constructing and then prioritizing a list of academic

and non-academic tasks that they needed to complete on

any given day. The area of the self-management notebook
labeled "non-recurring tasks" was used for the listing of
these tasks.
Meeting 5. No new procedures occurred at this time. The
experimenter reviewed previous instructions and answered
any new questions the students had.
Meeting 6. Further review and clarification occurred. The
students received their earned bonus points, and were
informed that all meetings and self-management activities
for the remaining weeks of the semester were now optional.
As part of the bonus point policy, during the two-week
intervention period, students would lose one bonus point
(out of five) each time their self-management notebooks
were incomplete when checked by a reliability observer. All
checks were unannounced. A student's notebook was categorized as "incomplete" if the student had failed to complete
any of the assigned procedures up to 24 hours prior to that
check. For example, if the notebook was checked at 1:00
P.M. on Tuesday, a rating of "incomplete" would be scored if
the student had failed to complete a self-management
procedure prior to 1:00P.M. on Monday. Hourly recording
records, quiz graph, study hours graph, and task-prioritizing
lists were included in the assessment of reliability, with each
student's notebook being checked a minimum of once a
week. For the self-recording component, a student's work
was scored as "complete" if at least 60% of the hourly
blocks were completed for each day. lnterobserver reliability
was calculated according to the following formula: reliability
= number of agreementsinumber of agreements plus disagreements, times 100.All reliability figures were above
91%.
Results. Eight of the nine students showed academic
improvement as a result of the self-management training,
with six demonstrating marked change. Before the training
had begun (baseline), the nine students had a median quiz
score of 70% (range 58-81); following intervention, they had
see Figure 1).
a median score of 88% (range 72-100,
From a total possible of 45 bonus points (five points per
student), the students lost only three points across all weeks
of the study due to the non-completion of any of the various
self-management exercises. During the majority of unannounced checks, most students maintained the selfmanagement behaviors consistently.
Follow-up checks conducted at one- and three-month
intervals after the termination of the experiment revealed that
three students contiriued all of the selfmanagement procedures: hourly behavior recording, graphing, schedule planning, and list-prioritizing; four other students continued one
or more of the self-management procedures, and only two
subjects had stopped all self-management activities. Those
two were the students who demonstrated the least improvement in quiz performance (i.e., Subjects 6 and 9).
Discussion. Experiment 1 evaluated several self-management procedures as part of the intervention for lowscoring students. The students responded favorably to the
self-management program as indicated by their quiz score
improvement, their reliable completion of the assigned selfmanagement exercises, and their maintenance of the self-

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BASELINE

TRAINING

BASELINE

TRAINING

BASELINE

TRAINING

WEEKS
Figure 1. Percentage of quiz points earned for each quiz of the semester across weeks. The horizontal solid lines indicate the median
percentage points earned by an individual student in each phase. Experiment 1.

management procedures after the experiment had concluded.

The results support the utility of self-recording and the
behaviors involved in "self-organization," that is,, scheduleplanning and list-prioritizing, for students having academic
difficulty. To further assess the contributing influence of
individual components of this multiple intervention, Experiment 2 was conducted.
Experiment 2.
A second study evaluated the following lnd~vldualselfmanagement procedures (a) hourly self-record~ng, (b)
student-developed rule statements, and (c) environmental
management procedures
Method. SIXlow-performing undergraduate psychology students partlclpated In Experiment 2, lnvolvlng two psychology
courses at Western Mlchlgan University The students were
sollclted and Informed of the study as described In Experiment 1
Agaln, quiz scores served as the dependent var~able
Three students took three qulzzes per week and the remalnIng three students took two quizzes per week As In Experlment I , the Self-Management Calendar (Sundberg, 1979)
served as a record for all wrltten products of self-management
program
Based on a multiple-baselme deslgn across subjects
wlth at least one week between lnterventlon dates, the
students partrcipated In the tralning program, as In Expenment 1, through one-to-one meetlngs
The procedures of Experiment 2 paralleled those of
Experlment 1, however, lnstructlons presented orally to
students In the f~rstexperiment were admlnlstered via standardlzed, written handouts durlng Experlment 2 Also, for

the duration of the second study, the experimenter explicitly

refrained from providing positive or negative feedback contingent upon a subject's quiz performance or selfmanagement behaviors.
During the first meeting, all six subjects received instructions to begin self-monitoring and self-recording on an
hourly basis, totaling at the bottom of each daily column the
number of hours they studied each day and the number of
hours they evaluated as "wasted." However, the students
did not transfer these data to a graphic display during
Experiment 2.
Self-management training interventions occurred for the
remainder of the experiment as warranted by a visual
inspection of the students' quiz scores. That is, additional
self-management procedures were implemented for only
those students who did not improve satisfactorily as a result
of the first self-management procedure, i.e., the hourly
self-recording component. Therefore, only three students
received the rule-construction training (Component 2) and
the environmental management training (Component 3), in
addition to the hourly self-recording training.
Results. Three students (i.e., Subjects 1, 2, and 3) improved their academic scores markedly upon implementation of the hourly recording procedure (Component I ) ,
having median scores of 66, 80, and 78 before training and
median scores of 100, 91, and 93 respectively after intervention (see Figure 2).
No lasting effects were demonstrated as a result of the
second component, i.e., student-constructed rule statements
for studying, when the students were merely asked to develop
these rules. Durlng the third self-management component,
i.e., environmental management, the remaining three students improved their quiz scores substantially, having

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BASELINE

HOURLY RECORDING

BASELINE

HOURLY RECORDING

E NVT
MNGT

RULES

'\u4!+=h~~l

I
I
I
I

I
1

5-4
I

WEEKS
Figure 2. Percentage of quiz points earned for each quiz of the semester across weeks. The horizontal solid lines indicate the median
percentage points earned by an individual student in each phase. Experiment 2 .

median scores of 68, 79, and 84 before intervention and

median scores of 82, 100, 95, respectively, following this
particular self-management training component.
Reliability was conducted as done in Experiment 1 , with
all reliability checks above 93%. Six bonus points (out of 30
total) were lost by the students as a result of incomplete
self-management exercises.

General Discussion. Self-management training can be an

effective method for improving a student's academic performance. In Experiment 1 , the median quiz score for the
nine students before implementation of the self-management
package was one point above the grade of "D" and following training was a solid "B" grade. In Experiment 2 : the six
students had a median quiz score of "C" before selfmanagement training. Three of the six students achieved
"A" level performance during the self-recording phase, with
two students achieving "A" level and one achieving "B" level
performance when the environmental management procedures were added.
The results of Experiment 1 support the combined efficacy of graphing, schedule-planning, list-prioritizing, environmental management, and self-recording for self-

management purposes; Experiment 2 provided further

support for the latter two procedures through an individualized implementation of each. An analysis of the role that
these procedures may have played in the improvement of
students' grades will now be provided.
Hourly self-recording may be an effective self-management procedure for several reasons. If the student was
neglecting or had neglected homework during the day,
self-punishing statements might result from the self-recording.
The self-recording procedure may have an effect on behavior if, for instance, the student opens a book and begins to
study to terminate the punishing self-statements. Selfrecording each hour may also, in general, strengthen "selfawareness" and a self-evaluation repertoire as the students
monitor their behavior; this monitoring might also increase
the likelihood that they will make reinforcing statements
contingent upon appropriate responding during the hour. In
fact, several students made comments that support these
assumptions, reporting that they had not previously realized
how little time they actually spent studying, and commenting
further that they were now more observant and critical of
how they spent the hours of the day.
A somewhat different analysis might apply to the envi-

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ronmental management procedures. Often, prevailing stimulus conditions do not support the behavior we would like to
engage in. Exercising, dieting, and studying are three
examples; the controlling variables for these activities are
often outnumbered by incentives for behaviors incompatible
with them. Thus, during the environmental-management
training, the students acquired the self-management skill of
manipulating the physical conditions of their room for studying purposes. After they identified the variables controlling
both their studying and non-studying, appropriate physical
changes were planned. Though reliability on such changes
was not determined, unsolicited self-reports from the students indicated that many such changes did take place.
Developing a list of rule statements for studying did not,
by itself, produce lasting academic improvement, though
the three students receiving this intervention did show
higher quiz scores initially. This may have been caused by a
loss of contact with the rules after they had been entered into
their notebooks. Posting these rules in proximity to their
study desk as part of the environmental management procedure (Phase 3 of Experiment 2) may have influenced
studying if the students evaluated their behavior with respect to the rule. Again, comments by the students supported the value of this procedure as they reported that a
given rule statement (e.g., one identifying parental rewards-such
as increased monetary support-contingent
upon satisfactory academic performance, or one identifying
parental punishment-such
as loss of car privilegescontingent upon unacceptable academic performance) did
indeed "make them study more." Rule statements, in general, may serve a mediating function, controlling behavior
when the usual consequences are certain and powerful but
temporarily deferred, when the individual states the rule as a
"reminder."
The present research provides further support for the
effectiveness of self-monitoring and self-recording as a
method to increase the frequency of a selected behavior,
and in addition, suggests that extensive environmental management, possibly including student-determined rule statements, could serve a useful function in self-management
programs.
Several cautionary statements should b e made however.
These procedures may not work equally well with all populations, or with all students within a given setting, as was found
in the present study. For instance, self-recording was maintained by the college students in this study with external
weekly monitoring and the use of a bonus point system.
Younger students or students with more serious academic or
behavioral problems may not respond as readily to such a
procedure. Further research could address these issues by
replicating these procedures with different populations, while
continuing to experimentally isolate the specific selfmanagement procedures that are the most effective.
The self-management procedures described here seem
practical, and the cost of implementing the training is low.
Though done on an individual basis for experimental purposes, the entire package could be taught to a group in two
to three hours. The procedures appear to have academic

generality at the university level, as students in four different

psychology courses demonstrated substantial improvement.
Also, the procedures appear to lead to durable behavior
change, as indicated by the maintenance of self-management
procedures by the majority of the students for several
months after all training had concluded.

References
Champlin, S. M., & Karoly, P. Role of contract negotiation in
self-management of study time: A preliminary investigation.
Psychological Reports, 1975, 37, 724-726.
Greiner, J . M., & Karoly, P. Effects of self-controltraining on study
activity and academic performance: An analysis of selfmonitoring, self-reward, and systematic-planning components.
Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1976, 23, 495-502.
Holland, J. G., Solomon, C., Doran, J., & Frezza, D. A. The analysis
of behavior in planning instruction. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1976.
Jones, R. T., Nelson, R. E., & Kazdin, A. E. The role of external
variables in self-reinforcement: A review. Behavior Modification,
1977, I , 147-148.
Keller, F. S. "Goodbye teacher . . ." Journal of Applied Behavior
Analysis, 1968, 1, 78-89.
Malott, R. W., Tillema, M., & Glenn, S. Behavior analysis and
behavior modification: An introduction. Kalamazoo, MI: Behavioradelia, Inc., 1978.
Michael, J. The essential components of effective instruction and
why most college teaching is not. In F. Keller and E. Ribes (Eds.),
Behavior modification. Boston, MA: Academic Press, 1974.
Miller, A,, & Gimpl, M. P. Operant verbal self-control of studying.
Psychological Reports, 1972, 30, 495-498.
O'Leary, S. G., & Dubey, D. R. Applications of self-control procedures by children: A review. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1979, 12, 449-465.
Reese, E. P. Human operant behavior. Dubuque, IA: Brown, 1978.
Richards, C. S., McReynolds, W. T., Holt, S., & Sexton, T. The
effects of information feedback and self-administered consequences on self-monitoring study behavior. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1976, 23, 316-321.
Rosenbaum, M. S., & Drabman, R. S. Self-control training in the
classroom: A review and critique. Journal of Applied Behavior
Analysis, 1979, 12, 467-485.
Skinner, B. F. Contingencies of reinforcement. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Sundberg, M. L. Self-management calendar. Grand Rapids, MI:
Behavior Associates, Inc., 1979.
Tichenor, J. L. Self-monitoring and self-reinforcement of studying
by college students. Psychological Reports, 1977, 40, 103-108.

Notes
1. Grant, L., & Deenan, J. B. Studying in college: A review.
Manuscript submitted for publication, 1981. (Available from L.
Grant, Department of Educational Psychology, West Virginia
University.)
2. Malott, R. W. Rule-governed behavior and the achievement of
evasive goals: A theoretical analysis. Unpublished manuscript,
1980. (Available from R. W. Malott, Department of Psychology,
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008.)
3. This study is based on a thesis submitted to the Department of
Psychology, Western Michigan University, by the first author in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MA degree. It contains all self-management forms and a copy of the standardized
instructions administered to students, and is available from
University Microfilms International, P.O. Box 1764, Ann Arbor,
MI 48106.
4. Address requests for reprints to R. W. Malott, Department of
Psychology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008.

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