[1] Major research at Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention and Early Intervention has studied three cohorts of thousands of student, some of whom have been followed from first grade into their 20s.
[6][7] The Good Behavior Game was first used in 1967 in Baldwin City, Kansas by Muriel Saunders, who was then a new teacher in a fourth-grade classroom.
Muriel Saunders, Harriet Barrish (a graduate student at the University of Kansas), and the professor and co-founder of applied-behavior analysis, the late Montrose Wolfe, co-created the Good Behavior Game in 1969.
After baseline data was collected, the teachers divided the students into two teams, discussed the rules of the game, and outlined the contingencies.
In addition to collecting data on disruptive behavior, the researchers evaluated the students' academic performance during two math periods in the fifth-grade classroom.
Each of the following procedural components contributed to its effectiveness: permission to leave school early, the number of marks chosen as a criterion, and the division of students into teams.
[12][13] Since the original 1969 study of the Good Behavior Game, there have been multiple randomized control trials conducted by Johns Hopkins University Center for Prevention and Early Intervention.