Excerpt from a Guide for Professionals
Praise,
Imagine you are a sixth grade teacher and a student, Issac, just had his backpack zipper pull apart so that everything fell out of the pack. Some students rush to help pick up all his spilled belongings. You say, “Raul, Derek, and Sonja, you are so kind for helping Issac. Good job!” It is important to publicly praise students in this way so that other students notice the prosocial behavior. This communicates that you value and notice prosocial behavior, setting a standard for the classroom. This also communicates that Raul, Derek, and Sonja are kind people, which will make classmates like them better and make them feel better about themselves, motivating them to be more prosocial in the future.
Research has found that when teachers increase the amount of praise they give students, relative to the number of reprimands, the students become more cooperative, less disruptive, and earn higher grades. This works even for highly disruptive students (Caldarella et al., 2020). Most teachers give one statement of praise for every four to nine reprimands or negative statements. If teachers can change that balance to one praise for one reprimand, student behavior improves dramatically.
Some educators want to give students rewards (e.g., stickers, candy, points) for prosocial behavior. Yet, this actually undermines prosocial behavior over the long-term. Why? It feels overly controlling to students, decreases their motivation to be prosocial, and undermines their development of self-control. In a famous experiment, preschoolers who liked to draw were randomly assigned to a group that was rewarded for their drawing or to a control group that was not rewarded. Later, the children who received the reward showed less interest in drawing. This effect has been replicated many times with children, teens, and adults doing many different tasks (e.g., Murayama, 2022). In contrast, praise does not have this undermining effect, so use praise but not rewards to acknowledge students’ prosocial behaviors.
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Social and Emotional Development in Children through Emerging Adults: A Guide for Professionals
By Dr. Christi Crosby Bergin and Dr. Kimberly A. Gordon Biddle
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ProsocialEd strategies were developed and studied by the nation’s premiere Prosocial Development & Education Research Lab at the University of Missouri (MU). Based on 50 years of developmental psychology research, we show that how adults interact with children influences their development of self-control, empathy, and prosocial behavior.
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