The direct and indirect effects of positive reinforcement on on-task behavior

Classroom management literature often recommends that in order to orient a misbehaving student to on-task behavior, a teacher ignore the behavior of the first student, while praising the appropriate behavior of a nearby student who is on-task. Experiment 1 tested this recommendation. Following Baseline 1, the teacher praised Vern's on-task behavior when Alice was off-task. In a later phase Alice received praise for being on-task when Vern was off-task. Contrary to the prior recommendation, the results showed that the second student did not improve when the first was praised. In fact, in one such phase, the second student's behavior deteriorated. The second experiment, which involved three pairs of students, included an additional phase in which the target student received token reinforcers for being on-task, while the second student was off-task. In these cases the indirect praise procedure improved the behavior of the second pupils in three out of six cases. The addition of tokens had no consistent effect. Even though the indirect praise procedure is sometimes effective, the authors recommend the use of a direct praise technique to maintain large improvements in behavior. The indirect reinforcement procedure might be used to initiate behavior change.