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 behavior-specific 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.