Praise Counts: Using Self-Monitoring to Increase Effective Teaching Practices

The authors examined the effectiveness of self-monitoring for increasing the rates of teacher praise statements and the acceptability of using this technique for teachers. The participant was a first-year teacher of high school students with emotional and behavioral disturbances. The authors completed this study in an ABA maintenance design. They gathered data by direct-observation frequency count sampling in 10-minute continuous intervals. Results indicate self-monitoring to have an effect size of 0.8365 as derived from a simple mean test on the rates of nonbehavior specific praise statements, an effect size of 0.9023 on the frequency of behaviorspecific praise statements and an overall effect of 0.9230. In all, this study's results support the use of self-monitoring to increase effective teaching practices, namely praise, and further demonstrates high social validity for the participant and the students.