Offering Positive Encouragement Improves Students Academics

Offering students more positive encouragement not only reduces disruptive classroom behavior but can improve students' academic and social outcomes, say, researchers. The findings, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, indicated that a behavior management intervention helped increase student engagement and boosted the teachers' confidence in their ability to manage disruptive behavior.

"As educators, we often focus on communicating what we don't want our students to be doing in class, but we have found that just doesn't work," said researcher Keith Herman from the University of Missouri in the US. "Instead, we need to be setting clear expectations of what behaviors we do want to be seeing," Herman added.

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For the study, the researchers implemented CHAMPS, a classroom behavior management training intervention, into a school classroom over the course of five years. The intervention not only decreased disruptive classroom behavior and student concentration problems but also improved both completed classwork and standardized test scores, as well as increased the number of times students remained on task with classroom assignments.

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"The intervention is based off principles and practices research has shown to be helpful in creating successful classroom management, such as communicating clear expectations to students, giving more positive encouragement compared to negative reprimands, and moving around the classroom to monitor student behavior," Herman said. (IANS/SP)