Who Is Responsible for Students’ Challenging Behaviour? A Study of the Causal Attributions of Teachers to Challenging Behaviour in Primary Schools in West Bengal, India

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review your manuscript ‘Who is responsible for students’ challenging behaviour? A study of teachers' Causal Attributions of Challenging Behaviour in Primary schools in West Bengal, India’. The paper presents a qualitative study investigating teachers’ perceptions of challenging behaviour, their casual attributions, and strategies they use to manage this behaviour. This is an interesting and well-designed study with interesting results. My only concern is with the paper’s fit for the journal given the lack of focus on disability.

Introduction

The authors provide a good overview of the literature. My only issue is the lack of focus on disability. Given the journal, I would expect much more focus on this. I have also noted some points below;

Lines 31-32: The authors argue that challenging behaviour puts children and staff at risk. Could you expand to make it clearer what you mean by risk?

Line 82: Can the authors add a reference to the statement ‘These types of challenging behaviour have been perceived by teachers across the world in several ways.’?

Lines 86-99: It is interesting to read about what is happening in other countries but why was Canada, China and Scotland selected? This needs to be clearer as well as the relevance of these findings to the current context.

Line 152: When presenting the strategies section, it would help if the authors linked this back to the attributions section. For example, they previously mentioned that attributions influence teacher behaviour. Has any previous research looked at this in relation to challenging behaviour strategies? A clearer link between attributions and strategies is needed here.

Line 175: The authors should consider moving the discussion of theoretical frameworks up to follow on form their initial discussion of attributions. It would be good to link in the types of attributions teachers make with the theory.

It would be good to have a ‘Current Study’ sub-heading at the end of this section to clearly introduce the study aims and research questions.

Materials and Methods

Line 205: In the participants section, it could be clearer exactly how many schools and teachers were invited to participate in order to work out % of study uptake.

Line 227: More justification over the use of semi-structured interviews is needed. Why were these selected as the data collection method?

Results

Line 263: It would be useful if the authors provided a short overview of the themes at the start of the results section.

Line 269: More data is needed to support the authors’ conceptualisation of the types of challenging behaviour. At present, only one quote is presented.

Line 292: More data is needed to support the ‘High academic expectations from students’ and ‘School-related causes’ themes.

Discussion

-It could be clearer in this section what the findings add to existing knowledge.

-Throughout this section, I would expect to see the findings related back to Attribution Theory.

-I would also expect to see more discussion of disability in order to make the study more relevant to the readers of the journal.

Author Response

Please see attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a well written and clearly presented paper that reports a well conducted study into teachers' attributes to the challenging behaviours they encounter in the classrooms of primary schools.  There are a number of elaborations that I feel would improve the paper which could be classed a minor revisions.

The authors could usefully elaborate on why a study conducted in India could offer new insights into the literature on teacher's management of challenging behaviour,  For example are there aspects of Indian culture or religious beliefs that might influence how children's behaviours are viewed and managed?

It would be helpful to know more about the researcher who undertook the interviews, his/her background and familiarity with Indian culture and the language used for the interviews.

Were the teachers asked to recount the sources of support available to them in managing children's behaviours, for example from psychologists or therapists.   The issue of support for teachers should also feature in the discussion.  For example, the authors might discuss the implications of their findings with respect to the training that teachers are given in India (and elsewhere) on managing children's behaviour.

Increasingly in my country, schools use suspension and exclusion as a means for managing the (severe) behaviours of children.  However this is detrimental to the pupils in many ways.   I appreciate that these approaches are more likely to arise with teenagers but perhaps the authors could point to the need for this study to be replicated in secondary schools and how exclusions might be prevented.

The authors could usefully highlight the questions that future research might address.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf