How Teachers Can Boost Middle School Kids’ Focus On Tasks By 70%

By the time students reach middle school, they are entering adolescence, with all of its emotional intensity. Restless, exuberant, stressed out, and prone to fits of giggling, even the sweetest middle schooler can become a teacher’s terror. Managing classroom behavior can be exhausting.

Further, teachers often expect that by middle school, kids are old enough to behave without being coddled. As a result, positive reinforcement techniques widely used in elementary school are often replaced by reprimand and consequences.

Now, a new study finds middle school teachers who praise students as least as often as they reprimand them boost class-wide performance by 60-70%.

Classroom managment

“As students get older, we often just expect that they’re going to be more mature and do what’s expected of them,” explained study author and BYU professor of education Paul Caldarella in a press release. “But they actually still need the same kind of reminders as elementary students. And any kind of negative comment made publicly to image-conscious teenagers, who are trying to establish their identity and peer relationships, is likely to make them shut down or get aggressive. So, it’s better to praise publicly and correct in private.”

The study, published in the Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, collected data from a randomized control trial, which means that it compared classrooms with teachers who followed their usual practice (control group) to classrooms where teachers were taught a new protocol. This was the Class-wide Function-related Intervention Teams Middle School (CW-FIT MS) protocol.

According to the paper, CW-FIT MS is an evidence-based set of class management practices for teachers. It relies on three practices:

1. Directly teach social skills like “how to show respect” or “follow directions.”


2. Increasing praise of students by the teacher.


3. “Interdependent group contingencies” where the class is divided into teams. In teams, the students work to stay on-task and use their social skills.

The teacher then looks over the room about every 5 minutes, praising on-task or social skills appropriate behavior and gently corrects the students where necessary. At each five minute mark, teams that were on-task earn a point. When the time period ends, teams that earned the goal number of points get a small reward.

Research had already found that CW-FIT MS decreases student disruptive behavior while increasing how often students stay on-task. And that’s important, because middle school teachers report difficulty managing classroom behaviors and often find themselves exhausted and frustrated. In desperation, many middle school teachers rely on punishment, but this only makes things worse.

Because negative management techniques are associated with more problematic behavior in students than positive ones, both teachers and students end up disengaged. Even worse, the study authors point out data showing that students from minority groups and those with disabilities or who are struggling with emotional disorders are more likely to face punishment than others. This can even include severe punishments like suspensions or expulsions.

Praise to Reprimand Ratio

Given the negative impact of reprimand or punishment based teaching on the classroom as a whole, and the disparity faced by vulnerable students, equiping teachers with an intervention like CW-FIT MS sounds like a good idea. But the study authors wanted to look specifically at one component of classroom management: “Praise-To-Reprimand Ratio,” or PRR.

Their interest arose because the researchers had already studied teachers’ PRR in elementary schools, but has not been examined in the middle school age group. “PRRs studied in elementary school have been positively associated with improvements in on-task and prosocial behavior,” the authors write in the paper. The more teachers praise students, the better they behave.

This left the researchers wondering why no-one had looked at this for middle school. For the study, they controlled for the CW-FIT MS intervention and then examined the effects of PRRs in 28 middle school classrooms.

“As PRRs increased, on-task behavior of the entire class improved,” they write. In other words, the kids were paying attention and doing their schoolwork.

When teachers praised the students more often, i.e. achieved a higher PRR:

1. The class as a whole spent more time on-task.


2. Vulnerable students at risk for emotional or behavioral disorders also spent more time on task.


3. Kids with emotional or behavioral disorders disrupted the class less often.

If middle school teachers reached a PRR of 1:1 or more, praising students as often or more than they reprimanded them, the classroom on-task behavior increased by 60-70%. That is a remarkable outcome for any intervention.

Not only this, but the impact was higher than expected. Praising middle schoolers improved their on-task behaviors twice as much as praising elementary schoolers had. The authors speculated that this may be due to the specific realities of adolescents’ needs.

“With middle school students, we really want to emphasize praising over reprimanding,” said Caldarella. “Especially if you have a student who is depressed, anxious, angry or dealing with any kind of emotional difficulty, the more you can praise and the less you reprimand, the better outcomes you’re likely to see.”

Particular praise

Praise has been a hot topic in the child development literature for some time now. And one of the most pressing questions has been whether the type of praise matters. Praising attributes by saying things like, “you are so smart,” or “you are so pretty,” is thought to actually increase kids’ fear of failure and sense that they may be a fraud. But praising for specific behaviors or for putting in effort is though to increase confidence.

This study did not look specifically at the style of praise teachers used, but included any “verbal statement indicating approval of student behavior beyond acknowledgment of adequate performance or correct response.”

Nevertheless, the teachers who were trained in CW-FIT MS were taught how to give such behavior-specific praise, where teachers specified the behavior for which the student was being praised. Examples included “Great job finishing your paper, Billy!” and “Class, you listened very carefully during the lesson on fractions!”

But when it came to analyzing PRRs, any praise was counted, including general praise statements like “Good job Andrew.”

And what that means is every little bit of positive attention by the teacher helps both individual students and the class as a whole.

“Especially with students coming back from a year grappling with COVID, it’s really going to be important to try to focus on the positives this year,” Caldarella said. “If you go into a classroom where there’s plenty of praise, you feel better and want to be there, and you behave accordingly.”

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