A Comparison of Public and Private Positive Peer Reporting in General Education Classrooms

• Main Author: Barahona, Carolyn
• Other Authors: Noell, George
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: LSU 2010
• Subjects: Psychology
• Online Access: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-05022010-191925/

Positive peer reporting (PPR) and Tootling have shown to be effective classwide interventions in decreasing maladaptive behavior and increasing positive interactions. In the current study, PPR was implemented as a classwide intervention by using an interdependent group contingency to determine if two variations of student praise reports affect classroom disruptive behavior. PPR uses public praise reports to decrease maladaptive behavior and increase prosocial interactions, while Tootling uses private praise reports on index cards to increase reports of prosocial interactions. This study compared students public praise reports to private praise reports of fellow students and evaluated how different praise types affect overall classroom disruptive behavior. The current study used an alternating treatments design with an initial baseline condition. The three alternating conditions included a Control, Public PPR, and Private PPR condition. The Public PPR condition had students publicly praise target students, while the Private PPR condition had students privately write praise reports on index cards. The teachers original classroom management strategy was used during the baseline and Control condition. Classwide observations of disruptive behavior were collected daily by using a partial interval recording system. Results suggest that neither public nor private reports affected classwide disruptive behavior. Implications for future research and limitations of the current study will be discussed.