The Scientific World Journal

Volume 2012, Article ID 208907, 8 pages

The cientificWorldJOURNAL doi:10.1100/2012/208907

Research Article
Student Classroom Misbehavior: An Exploratory Study Based
on
Teachers Perceptions
Rachel C. F. Sun1 and Daniel T. L. Shek2,3,4,5
1

The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Education, Hong Kong

Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
3
Public Policy Research Institute, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
4
Kiang Wu Nursing College of Macau, Macau
5
Division of Adolescent Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, University of Kentucky College of Medicine, Lexington, KY 40506,
USA
2

Correspondence should be addressed to Rachel C. F. Sun, [email protected]

Received 24 September 2011; Accepted 7 November 2011
Academic Editor: Joav Merrick
Copyright 2012 R. C. F. Sun and D. T. L. Shek. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited.
This study aimed to examine the conceptions of junior secondary school student misbehaviors in classroom, and to identify the
most common, disruptive, and unacceptable student problem behaviors from teachers perspective. Twelve individual interviews
with teachers were conducted. A list of 17 student problem behaviors was generated. Results showed that the most common and
disruptive problem behavior was talking out of turn, followed by nonattentiveness, daydreaming, and idleness. The most
unacceptable problem behavior was disrespecting teachers in terms of disobedience and rudeness, followed by talking out of
turn and verbal aggression. The findings revealed that teachers perceived student problem behaviors as those behaviors
involving rulebreaking, violating the implicit norms or expectations, being inappropriate in the classroom settings and upsetting
teaching and
learning, which mainly required intervention from teachers. of the student and his/her classmates. Moreover, research

1. Introduction
Student misbehaviors such as disruptive talking, chronic
avoidance of work, clowning, interfering with teaching
activities, harassing classmates, verbal insults, rudeness to
teacher, defiance, and hostility [1], ranging from
infrequent to frequent, mild to severe, is a thorny issue in
everyday classroom. Teachers usually reported that these
disturbing behaviors in the classroom are intolerable [2]
and stress-provoking [3], and they had to spend a great
deal of time and energy to manage the classroom [4, 5].
Obviously, student misbehaviors retard the smoothness
and efectiveness of teaching and also impede the learning

findings have shown that school misbehavior not only

escalated with time but also lowered academic
achievement and increased delinquent behavior [6, 7]. To
lessen these immediate and gradual adverse efects of
student misbehaviors, it is of primary importance to
identify what exactly are these behaviors inside classroom.
In the literature, diferent terms have been used to
describe problematic behaviors of students. For instance,
Stewart et al. [8] referred student misconduct to disciplinary
violations in school, for instance, tardiness, vandalism,
fighting, stealing, and drinking on campus. When there are
explicit rules and regulations in school and classroom,
violation of these is apparently a misbehavior or misconduct
or discipline problem. Nevertheless, a particular behavior is
viewed as problematic may not necessarily be rule breaking,
but inappropriate or disturbing in the classroom setting. For
instance, daydreaming in class, not completing homework,

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talking in class, lesson disruption, bullying, and rudeness to
the teacher are named as problem behaviors [9], behavior
problems, [10, 11] or disruptive behaviors [4, 12]. These
behaviors referred to an activity that causes distress for
teachers, interrupts the learning process and that leads
teachers to make continual comments to the student [13,
page 60], or the myriad activities which disrupt and impede
the teaching-learning process [14, page 43]. Noting that
school misconduct is one of the manifests of the problem
behavior syndrome [1517], the term problem behavior
was used to refer to all externalizing behaviors that violate
explicit rules or implicit norms, disturb the classroom order,
and irritate the process of teaching and learning in this study.
Several scales have been developed to measure teachers
perceptions of classroom problem behaviors. For instance, in
the United Kingdom, Wheldall and Merrett [10] used ten
items, including eating, nonverbal noise, disobedience,
talking out of turn, idleness/slowness, unpunctuality,
hindering others, physical aggression, untidiness, and out of
seat, to measure behavior problems among primary school
students. Houghton et al. [11] also used these behaviors to
measure secondary school students behavior problems, with
a replacement of eating with verbal abuse because they found
that teachers did not perceive eating as a problem behavior
among secondary school students whereas verbal abuse was
a more relevant behavior problem.
However, the cultural relevance of these scales to
describe and measure disruptive behavior among primary
and secondary school students in Hong Kong Chinese
classroom is a concern that should be addressed. For
example, Ho and Leung [12] and Leung and Ho [4] modified
Wheldall and Merretts scale [10] by dropping disobedience,
and adding six student behaviors commonly reported by
local teachers in Chinese school settings. These included
verbal abuse, forgetfulness, nonattentiveness, gambling,
reading other materials, and doing other things. However, as
these descriptors of students disruptive behaviors were
formed almost a decade ago, their validity and applicability
to Chinese classrooms nowadays may be questioned. Some
student behaviors that have not be mentioned in the previous
studies, such as daydreaming, sleeping, looking out of
window, playing with personal stuf in private, bullying,
disrespecting, talking back, arguing, quarrelling or fighting
with teachers, complaining, and lack of independent
initiative were found by a recent study in exploring Chinese
teachers perceptions of students classroom misbehavior
[18]. On top of this, uncooperativeness, emotional
disturbance, overactivity and withdrawal were also reported
as student classroom behavior problems by Chinese
elementary school teachers [5]. Although these two studies
were recent, both were conducted in mainland China. It is
thus argued that the scales developed in these studies as well
as the findings may be limited to describing student problem
behaviors in mainland China classroom, which is diferent
from the pluralistic classroom in which Confucian and
Western teaching and learning approaches are used in Hong
Kong. As such, direct employment of an existing scale is
hardly sufcient to tap all the classroom problem behaviors
exhibited by students. It is, therefore, important to carry out a
qualitative research study to unravel relevant and upto-dated
descriptions of the students problem behaviors in Hong
Kong classroom based on the views of teachers.

2
Apart from exploring diferent categories of student
problem behaviors inside classroom, it is also valuable to
identify the common ones and the disruptive ones from the
teachers perspectives. Existing research findings showed
that, among various types of student problem behaviors,
talking out of turn, hindering others, and idleness were
commonly reported by secondary school teachers as the most
frequent and troublesome misbehaviors in the United
Kingdom [11] and Australia [19]. Similar to these findings in
the West, talking out of turn was rated by both primary and
secondary school teachers as the most frequent and
troublesome misbehavior, followed by nonattentiveness
and forgetfulnesstwo other typical students disruptive
behaviors in Hong Kong classroom [4, 12]. In mainland
China, nonattentiveness, talking out of turn, and
overactive were reported as the most frequent and
troublesome classroom behavior problems by the elementary
school teachers in three provinces [5]. On the other hand,
daydreaming, talking out of turn, and playing with
personal stuf were rated as the most frequent classroom
misbehaviors by a group of elementary, middle and high
school teachers in another two provinces, while
daydreaming, slowness and talking out of turn were
the most troublesome classroom misbehaviors [18].
Apparently, talking out of turn is usually ranked as highly
popular and disturbing student misbehavior across time and
cultures and in diferent grade levels of students. With a
specific focus on studying the problem behaviors of junior
secondary students in Hong Kong classroom, this study
attempted to replicate the previous studies in examining the
problem behaviors perceived by teachers as the most
common and disruptive. In addition, this study further
attempted to investigate the most unacceptable problem
behaviors in the eyes of teachers and the underlying reasons
behind.
The primary goal of this study was to examine classroom
problem behaviors among junior secondary school students
in Hong Kong based on the views of teachers. The aims of
this study were to (i) generate a list of categories of students
problem behaviors perceived by teachers in Hong Kong
junior secondary school classroom, (ii) identify problem
behaviors that were perceived as the most common, the most
disruptive to teaching and learning in classroom, and the
most unacceptable problem behavior and the reasons. Noting
that the most frequent misbehavior can be somehow
objectively observed, a particular behavior is regarded as the
most disruptive or unacceptable depending on the teachers
subjective judgment and values, professional training, and
years of teaching experiences. Therefore, this study recruited
teachers with diferent years of teaching experiences and
training background, in order to get a comprehensive view of
the issue. It is a descriptive and exploratory qualitative
research study. Academically, the present findings would add
to the local literature, as recent research studies on this topic
are scanty in Hong Kong [8, 9]. Even though there were
some studies, they were conducted a decade ago [4, 12] and
limited to focusing on the mainland China educational
settings [5, 18]. Practically, it was expected that the findings
would have profound importance to counseling and guidance
work in the school context.

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2. Methods
2.1. Participants. Three schools, each admitting students
having low, medium or high academic competencies, were
invited to join this study. In each school, four teachers who
had experiences of teaching junior secondary grades (Grade
7, 8, and/or 9) and/or were members of the school counseling
team and/or discipline teams were invited to join an
individual interview. In total, twelve teachers (5 males and 7
females) participated in this study. Four of them were
members of the school counseling team and three were
members of the discipline team. The average of their
teaching experiences was 9.25 years (range = 122 years).
Their participation was voluntary and written consent from
the school principals and the interviewees were obtained
prior to data collection. Issues of anonymity and
confidentiality in handling the data were also clearly
explained at the beginning of each interview.
2.2. Instrument. A self-constructed semistructured interview
guide was used for each individual interview. In the
interview guide, questions and prompts used to explore the
interviewees perceptions of students problem behaviors and
their management strategies in the classroom and school
contexts. The interviewees were asked to define problem
behaviors based on their own understanding and
interpretation. They were invited to use real-life examples to
further illustrate their views. The average time for an
interview was 49 minutes (range = 3378 minutes). Each
interview was conducted by two trained interviewers in
Cantonese (the mother tongue of both the interviewers and
interviewees). The interviews were audio-taped with
informants prior consent and transcribed in verbatim after
the interview.
As many questions were covered in the interview guide,
only data related to the following questions were analyzed in
this paper.
(1) In the classroom, what student problem behaviors are
there? Please list out as many as possible and
describe.
(2) Among these problem behaviors, which are the most
common?
(3) Among these problem behaviors, which are the most
disruptive to teaching and learning?
(4) Among these problem behaviors, which are the most
unacceptable? Please illustrate.
2.3. Data Analysis. Findings pertinent to teachers
perceptions of students problem behavior inside classroom
are reported in this paper. Data was analyzed by using
general qualitative analyses techniques [20]. First level of
coding was conducted by a colleague who has a Bachelor
degree of Psychology and teaching experiences.
Semantically similar words, phrases, and/or sentences that
formed meaningful units in each conclusion at the raw
response level were grouped whereas semantically diferent
data were divided. Further checking and second levels of
coding and categorization were conducted by the first author,
in which similar codes were grouped to reflect higher-order
categories of theme. The coding and categorization were
finalized with consensus among the coders and further

3
checked by a colleague with a Bachelor degree of
Psychology and professional counseling training.
As the code and categorization were inductively derived
from the data, both intra- and interrater reliability on the
coding were calculated to ensure the credibility of the
findings. In the reliability test, 20 raw responses were
randomly selected for each rater to code without referring to
the original codes. The intrarater reliability tests were
conducted by the two coders independently; whereas the
interrater reliability tests were conducted by two colleagues
(one has a Master degree and several years of teaching
experiences and one has a Bachelor degree) independently.
The reliability of the categorization was on the high side,
because the intrarater agreement percentages were both
100%; while the interrater agreement percentages were 80%
and 95%.

3. Results
3.1. Categories of Classroom Problem Behaviors. Table 1
summarizes 88 responses regarding students problem
behaviors inside classroom reported by 12 informants. The
responses were classified into 17 main categories, and 6 of
them were further divided into subcategories. As shown in
Table 1, the problem behaviors reported by the teachers were
mostly doing something in private, talking out of turn,
verbal
aggression,
disrespecting
teachers,
nonattentiveness/daydreaming/idleness,
sleeping,
habitual failure in submitting assignments, and out of
seat.
Teachers reported that students would do something in
private which was unrelated to the lesson, such as reading,
drawing, and doing other homework. Some teachers pointed
out that it was a rising phenomenon that students liked to use
electronic devices, such as mobile phone for texting people
inside or outside classroom, playing electronic games,
surfing webpage, or listening to music. In response to this
phenomenon, there were regulations in some schools
prohibiting students to switch on their mobile phones inside
school.
Talking out of turn was another problem behavior
which was mainly referred to students chatting among
themselves on irrelevant topics that disrupts the lessons,
calling out, and making remarks on somebody or something
without teachers permission. It is distinguished from verbal
aggression which was referred to more hostile verbal
expression, such as teasing, attacking, quarrelling, and
speaking foul language.
Disrespecting teachers appeared to be an attitude, but
the teachers could concretely describe some behaviors under
this category. For instance, a teacher mentioned that refusing
to follow instructions was a disobedient and disrespectful
behavior. Teacher B02 commented that
...challenging your (teachers) authority,
mainly like, if you ask them not to do
something, they are rebellious and insist to
behave the other way round. They wont listen
to teachers opinion. They will insist to do what
they think...These behaviors are mainly
perceived in lower competent classes at the
moment.

4
Another teacher illustrated that disrespecting teachers
meant rudeness, talking back, and confronting teachers. As
remarked by Teacher C04:

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sometimes they will even dispute against their
teacher...A student gave an irrelevant answer

Table 1: A Summary of the teachers perceptions of student problem behaviors inside classroom.
Number of
Number of
Number of
responses
Number
responses
responses
Category
Subcategory
of
regarding on the
responses
regarding on the regarding on the
most common most disruptive most unacceptable
problem behavior
problem behavior
behavior
Dealing with personal stuf
3
0
0
0
Doing homework
2
0
0
0
Using electronic device (for
4
0
0
0
texting, playing games, surfing
webpage, listening to music)
Doing something in private
Irrelevant reading
2
0
0
0
Irrelevant drawing
2
0
0
0
Subtotal
13
0
0
0
Calling out
1
0
0
1
Making
remarks
1
0
0
0
Talking out of turn
Having disruptive
9
5
2
2
conversation
Subtotal
11
5
2
3
Teasing classmates
4
0
0
1
Attacking classmates
3
1
1
0
Verbal aggression
Quarrelling with classmates
1
0
0
0
Speaking foul language
2
0
0
1
Subtotal
10
1
1
2
Disobedience/Refusing to
4
0
0
2
carry out instructions
Disrespecting teachers
Rudeness/Talking back,
4
1
1
3
arguing with teacher
Subtotal
8
1
1
5
Non-attentiveness/Daydreaming/Idleness
7
2
2
1
Sleeping
6
0
1
0
Changing seats
1
1
0
0
Wandering around the
2
0
1
1
classroom Catching
1
0
0
0
Out of seat
Running away from the
1
0
0
0
classroom
Subtotal
5
1
1
1
Habitual failure in submitting
5
0
0
1
assignments
Striking classmates
2
0
0
0
Pushing classmates
1
0
0
0
Physical aggression
Destroying things
1
0
0
0
Subtotal
4
0
0
0
Copying homework
4
1
0
0
Via body language, facial
Non-verbal communication
4
0
0
0
expressions, papers
Clowning
3
0
0
1
Playing
3
0
0
0
Lateness to class
2
0
0
0
Eating/Drinking
1
1
0
0

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Have not yet prepared textbook well
Passive engagement in class
Total responses

to teachers question, that is, the teacher asked

a serious question but the student gave a casual
answer. If the teacher commented on, the
student would be enraged and hostile, and then
disputed against the teacher. Scolding teacher
was unusual, unless the student was agitated.
At the school level, I think there were less than
five cases of scolding teacher in an academic
year. Quite rare. When arguing, students
usually had poor attitudes, especially boys.
Hence, teachers would scold at them, and the
students would become hostile, temperlosing... more seriously, they would knock
tables or throw books to express their anger.
But this situation was very rare; say one to two
cases a year.
Nonattentiveness/daydreaming/idleness, sleeping,
and out of seat (including changing seats deliberately,
wandering around the classroom, catching, running away
from the classroom without permission) were commonly
reported as problem behaviors inside classroom. Some
teachers also regarded failure to submit assignments on
time in a habitual manner as one of the problem behaviors,
as reflected in the following narrative:
[failure in submitting homework on time] is
one of the problems if you are talking about
students misbehavior at school...this is quite a
big problem in fact...There are a large
proportion of students who fail to submit their
homework on time, especially among Form 1
(Grade 7) student...Only half class can submit
the homework on time if you set the deadline
once. You need to chase after them for the
homework...I think Form 1 (Grade 7) students
are more likely to fail to submit their
homework. In Form 2 (Grade 8), some classes
can do better (Teacher C03).
Some teachers added that some of the aforementioned
problem behaviors, such as talking out of turn and
disrespecting teachers, were commonly found among a
specific group of students who had special education needs.
A teacher mentioned that
once I taught a student with SEN (Special
Educational Needs) who had attention
deficit... He had problems in getting along
with his classmates. When other classmates
had wrong answers, he would immediately call
out and point out their mistakes. This in fact
slightly afected the class (Teacher C01).
Another teacher reported that
I know that there are one or two SEN
student(s) in every grade in our school. These
students are quite disruptive. For example, they
often have emotional disturbance, run away

5
1
1
88

0
0
12

0
0
8

0
1
15

from classroom and sometimes fight against

with their teachers (Teacher B01).
3.2. Problem Behaviors That Were Most Common and
Disruptive to Teaching and Learning. Among various
classroom problem behaviors reported, comparatively more
teachers pointed out that having disruptive conversation
was a form of talking out of turn, which was the most
common and the most disruptive to teaching and learning
(see Table 1). A teacher explained that
chatting during lesson afects teaching and
learning most... Whereas other behaviors such
as daydreaming only afect self-learning,
chatting will alter the whole class atmosphere
as well as class progress. I have to stop the
chatting, otherwise I cannot teach and the
students who chat will miss the content of the
lesson. If I do nothing, other students will
imitate and join the conversation...As the
classroom is small, others can still hear even
you talk in a low voice. Moreover, students are
very attentive to the surroundings. So such
chatting can be disruptive even you chat in a
very low voice (Teacher C04).
Nonattentiveness/daydreaming/idleness was the next
common and disruptive problem behavior. A teacher
explained that
daydreaming during lesson will afect
learning. If they are not attentive to the teacher,
they have already missed some knowledge
(Teacher B04).
3.3. The Most Unacceptable Problem Behaviors inside
Classroom. As indicated in Table 1, disrespecting
teachers were rated by five teachers as the most
unacceptable problem behavior. As revealed in the
interviews, such behavior indicated that students lacked
proper attitudes and values in interpersonal relationships as
well as in their morality.
Teacher C04 remarked that
disputing against teachers is disrespecting
teachers...Other
misbehaviors
are
just
behaviors. The underlying reasons of these
behaviors are simple. For instance, chatting in
the middle of lesson could take place because
they feel bored; or they just pop up some ideas
to share with their neighbors. However, if they
argue back or disrespect their teachers, it is
something related to their attitudes and values.
So
I
think
this
is
the
biggest
problem...Normally, they behave ofensively
against individual teachers, a certain kind of
teachers including those who are too gentle or
those who are rigid but not convincing.
Another teacher added that

6
[in confrontation]...some students like to
twist the fact and shout their fallacy out loud to
amuse their classmates. This is something that
I cannot accept...It is obvious that he does not
hold a point but still insists he is correct. I
think this kind of behavior is unacceptable
(Teacher C03).
Talking out of turn and verbal aggression were also
mentioned by teachers as unacceptable, because these
behaviors disrupted the classroom order, which required
teachers to spend time in managing classroom discipline
and thus would adversely afect teaching. Among these
verbal aggressive behaviors, teachers revealed that they
could not accept students speaking foul language and
teasing others, particularly insult would hurt the bullied.
Furthermore, individual teachers mentioned that
nonattentiveness/daydreaming/idleness, out of seat,
habitual failure in submitting assignments, clowning,
and passive engagement in class as unacceptable, mainly
because these behaviors would afect student learning and
classroom atmosphere. For instance, in a teachers
perception of nonattentiveness, he expressed that
if all students are unwilling or not motivated to
learn, it will be very disastrous (Teacher A01).
Another teacher explained why out of seat was
unacceptable:
if they sit still on their chairs, it is settled and
they are less likely to have distracting
behaviors or more severe problem behaviors. If
they are out of seat, they may act out. There is
a greater chance that they will distract other
students and so the whole class. Therefore, I
think this behavior is relatively unacceptable
(Teacher C01).
Another teacher showed his view on passive engagement
in class by stating that
... the most unacceptable behavior? I think it
is inactive during lesson. To me, it is
misbehavior although it is not obvious. If there
are a number of passive students in my class, it
is hard for me to teach them. No matter how
and what I teach, they just do not want to learn.
Compared with these inactive students, those
who make noise in class are better. At least
there is interaction even we argue (Teacher
A02).

4. Discussion
Based on the perspective of teachers, this study attempted
to generate a list of categories of students problem
behaviors in Hong Kong junior secondary school
classroom, and to identify the most common, disruptive and
unacceptable student problem behaviors. As shown in Table
1, a list of 17 student problem behaviors was reported by
the teachers, including doing something in private, talking
out of turn, verbal aggression, disrespecting teachers,
nonattentiveness/daydreaming/idleness, sleeping, out of

The Scientific World Journal

seat, habitual failure in submitting assignments, physical
aggression, copying homework, nonverbal communication,
clowning, playing, lateness to class, eating/drinking, have
not yet prepared textbook well, and passive engagement in
class.
Among them, the most common and disruptive misbehavior
was talking out of turn, particularly in the form of
disruptive
conversation.
The
next
one
was
nonattentiveness/daydreaming/idleness.
The
most
unacceptable problem behavior was disrespecting teachers
in terms of disobedience and rudeness, followed by talking
out of turn, and verbal aggression. Teachers would consider
these behaviors as intolerable when they disrupt teaching,
afect student learning adversely, or suggest the fact that
students do not have proper values and attitudes. These
findings indicate that teachers are concerned about
classroom learning and student development, and they
expect that there are respect, obedience, order, and
discipline in the classroom.
There were some unique findings of this study, although
most of the categories of problem behaviors identified are
similar to those reported in the previous studies. First,
doing something in private was regarded as a student
problem behavior in secondary school classroom in Chinese
cultural contexts [12, 18], while it was not included in some
studies conducted in the West [11, 19]. In this category, on
top of dealing with personal stuf, doing other homework,
reading, and drawing that are unrelated to the lesson, this
study showed that using electronic devices (e.g., mobile
phone) for texting, playing games, surfing webpage, and
listening to music were regarded as problematic nowadays.
With particular focus to Hong Kong, mobile phones are
popular among adolescents. As these electronic devices are
multifunctional and audio-visual stimulating, some students
would be tempted to use them for communication and
fulfilling personal satisfaction even during lesson. Actually,
doing something in private is an of-task behavior in which
students are doing something irrelevant to classroom
learning. Others, like nonattentiveness, idleness, and
daydreaming were grouped together as a category of
problem behaviors in this study because they were
mentioned as related to the fact that students were tired,
lazy, or lacking learning motivation. Sleeping was a single
category, because it was an obvious of-task behavior and
would be disruptive if students imitate each others.
Similar to most of the existing studies [1012], talking
out of turn included calling out, making remarks, and
having disruptive conversation. All these referred to verbal
disturbance in the lesson without teachers permission. This
conception is much wider than the narrow definition in
Ding et al.s study [18] where talking out of turn was
simply referred to calling out answers without raising hands
and being called upon by teachers. As usual, talking out of
turn was rated by teachers as the most common and
disruptive to teaching and learning. It was due to the fact
that the noises are disruptive and teachers need to spend
time to manage, otherwise, such behaviors would escalate
in term of frequency and intensity and would be contagious.
Another
reason
is
that
when
compared
to
nonattentiveness/daydreaming/idleness,
irrelevant
chatting is more than an of-task behavior that adversely
afects students own learning. It is also a distracting
behavior hampering others learning in the same classroom.

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Following talking out of turn, verbal aggression
appeared to be a distinct problem behavior which was
disruptive as well as hostile, such as speaking foul language
as well as making ofensive or insulting remarks to tease
and assault classmates that further led to quarrelling or
mutual attacking [11, 12]. All these might escalate to
physical aggression, such as striking and pushing each
others and destroying things in the classroom. The lack of
sympathy or hostility involved in these aggressive
behaviors was mentioned as intolerable as the teachers
recognized the hurt involved. It reflected that caring was
valued in the eyes of the teachers when they judged a
behavior was problematic or not.
It is not surprising that disrespecting teachers was
highlighted in this study as a kind of unacceptable problem
behavior, because respect and obedience are the deeply
rooted values in Chinese education. Disrespecting
teachers embraced disobedience, that is, refusing or failing
to carry out instructions [1012], and rudeness, that is,
talking back and arguing with teachers [18]. Sometimes,
these behaviors would also be perceived as ofensive to
authority. These findings further demonstrated that these
values are still strongly held in teacher expectations, and
thus behaviors that fail to comply were pinpointed as
disrespectful and the students were judged as lacking proper
values and attitudes. The findings suggest that problem
behaviors include those breaking explicit rules as well as
those infringing implicit norms or expectations.
Apart from respect and obedience, order and discipline
are essential elements of the Chinese classroom. Therefore,
out of seat, playing, clowning, lateness to class,
eating/drinking, copying homework, and habitual
failure in submitting assignments were some common
student problem behaviors perceived as disruptive to
classroom order. The interviews revealed that on one hand,
the teachers would like to have more control on the
classroom order and discipline for not only easy
management but also facilitating student learning. On the
other hand, they would like students to have more selfcontrol or self-discipline which is an important ingredient in
learning. Moreover, have not yet prepared textbook well
and passive engagement in class were some unique
problem behaviors reported by the teachers in this study. It
also reflected that some teachers expected students to get
ready for the lesson and take an active role to learn
throughout the lesson. If students were passive and not
engaged, similar to daydreaming and not paying attention,
teachers tended to regard students as irresponsible for their
learning and even lacking learning motivation. Again,
perception or labeling of problem behaviors results from the
mismatches between the student behaviors and the social
expectations. In short, the present findings indicated that
student problem behaviors are not necessarily rulebreaking, but violating the implicit norms (e.g., the cultural
values of respect, obedience, order, and discipline) or
expectations (e.g., students can control their behaviors and
be responsible for their own and others learning). These
problem behaviors are inappropriate in the classroom
settings, as well as upsetting the classroom teaching and
learning, which mainly require intervention from teachers.
Although some unique findings were observed in this
study, there were some limitations involved. First, as only
twelve teachers from three secondary schools were

7
involved, representativeness of the findings should be
viewed with caution. Second, as only teachers were
interviewed, the findings may reveal the assumptions and
biases of the teachers due to their social role as teacher.
Therefore, it would be more comprehensive if the views of
the students can be also included. Apart from looking at the
categorization and descriptions of student problem
behaviors, it would be more insightful if the antecedents of
these behaviors or efective classroom management
strategies could be explored in future. In particular, it would
be exciting to see how curricular-based programs can help
to reduce classroom misbehavior. One example that should
be considered is the Project P.A.T.H.S. (Positive Adolescent
Training through Holistic Social Programmes) in Hong
Kong [21]. There are findings showing that the program
could promote holistic youth development and reduce
adolescent substance abuse and delinquent behavior [22
24]. It would be interesting to see whether the program can
lessen classroom misbehavior in the long run.

Acknowledgments
The authorship of this paper is equally shared by both
authors. The research and preparation for this paper was
financially supported by the Faculty Research Fund,
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong.
Special thanks to Ms. Evana Lam and Ms. Katrina Cheung
for their assistance in data collection and analysis.

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