Training preschool children to recruit natural communities of reinforcement.
Teach preschoolers to self-check work and say "Look, I did good work" to triple teacher praise without extra training.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Eight preschoolers learned to ask teachers for praise.
Kids first rated their own work with smiley or frown faces.
Next they handed the paper to the teacher while saying, "Look, I did good work."
Trainers used a multiple-baseline design across children to show the skill caused more teacher praise.
What they found
All eight children quickly began recruiting praise.
Teacher praise tripled when children used the new phrase.
Skills moved to new teachers only after trainers added extra practice with each adult.
How this fits with other research
Gerald et al. (2019) flipped the script. They gave teachers timers and checklists so staff praised themselves for doing data sheets. Both studies use self-management, but one helps kids prompt adults and the other helps adults prompt themselves.
Johnson et al. (2024) sent weekly email reminders to teachers. Emails alone raised teacher accuracy and child compliance. The 1978 paper shows children can do the reminding instead of an email system.
Lowe et al. (1974) taught four children to wave hello across many adults. Using two trainers during teaching made the greeting spread to 20 new staff. The 1978 study used the same "train with several adults" trick so praise requests would generalize.
Why it matters
You can triple natural teacher praise in one afternoon.
Teach the child to judge their own work, then hand it over with a short script.
Add quick practice with every adult the child sees so the skill travels across teachers.
No extra staff meetings, apps, or tokens needed—just a smiley face sheet and a sentence.
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Join Free →Pick one preschooler, add a smiley-face self-rating box to their worksheet, and prompt them to hand it to the teacher while saying "Look, I did good work"—count teacher praise before and after.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Four normal and four deviant children aged four-to-six years were taught to judge the quality of their academic work in a preschool classroom, and to prompt or cue their teachers to comment about the quality of that work. When these skills did not generalize spontaneously to other teachers in concurrent natural situations, generalized responding was taught by the experimenter, in multiple-baseline design across subjects. This generalization programming enabled the children to contact a sometimes dormant, but readily available natural community of teacher praise and reinforcement, i.e., to recruit an increase in cued praise and schedules of praise for their good work. These behaviors may be important to young children who find themselves bereft of attention in classrooms.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1978 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1978.11-285