Positive encouragement may up academic outcomes in school kids

New York: Offering students more positive encouragement not only reduces disruptive classroom behaviour, but can improve students' academic and social outcomes, say researchers.

The findings, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, indicated that a behaviour management intervention helped increase student engagement and boosted the teachers' confidence in their ability to manage disruptive behaviour.

"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 behaviours we do want to be seeing," Herman added.

For the study, the researchers implemented CHAMPS, a classroom behaviour management training intervention, into a school classroom over the course of five years.

The intervention not only decreased disruptive classroom behaviour and student concentration problems, but also improved both completed class work and standardized test scores, as well as increased the amount of time students remained on task with classroom assignments.

"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 behaviour," Herman said.