Tootling in an After-School Setting: Decreasing Antisocial Interactions in At-Risk Students

Abstract

This study was designed to extend the research on tootling interventions, which involves reinforcing students’ reporting of their peers’ incidental prosocial behaviors. Specifically, a withdrawal design was used to determine if a tootling intervention decreased antisocial/disrespectful interactions of four, teacher-nominated students in an after-school, third-grade classroom. Visual analysis of a repeated-measures graph and effect size estimates suggested that the tootling intervention decreased these interactions. Discussion focuses on future research designed to evaluate the generalizability of tootling interventions and the effects of similar interventions over time and across dependent variables.

Using a Tootling intervention to sequentially enhance and maintain at-risk elementary students’ performance of multiple social skills.

“…One reason researchers developed the Tootling intervention was to influence students to focus on their classmates’ day-to-day prosocial behaviors, as opposed to monitoring and reporting classmates’ antisocial behaviors (Skinner et al, 2000). This enhanced awareness of classmates’ prosocial behaviors, as opposed to any increases in the students’ performance of these prosocial behaviors, could account for Tootling intervention outcomes including reductions in antisocial behaviors and increases in academic engagement (e.g., Kirkpatrick et al, 2019; Lum et al, 2019). Wright et al (2021) extended research on Tootling by demonstrating that a modified Tootling intervention increased the performance of the behaviors that students were reinforced for reporting.…”

“…Researchers showed that implementing Tootling in classrooms can also increase on-task behavior and decrease calling out and out-of-seat behavior (Cihak et al, 2009;Lambert et al, 2015;Lum et al, 2019;McHugh et al, 2016). Kirkpatrick et al (2019) found that a Tootling intervention decreased students' antisocial interactions (i.e., mean and disrespectful behaviors).…”

Tootling: A Classwide Peer-Mediated Intervention for Decreasing Antisocial and Disruptive Behavior and Enhancing Prosocial Behaviors and Academic Engagement

“…S-H-S behavior captures a broad array of prosocial behaviors, in the same manner that students report a broad array of antisocial behaviors (e.g., name-calling, being out of seat, cheating) when tattling. Indeed, researchers have found that having students report S-H-S behaviors while Tootling decreased disruptive classroom behaviors and social aggression (Kirkpatrick et al, 2019;Lambert et al, 2015;Lum et al, 2017Lum et al, , 2019McHugh et al, 2016).…”

Interdependent Group-Oriented Contingencies: Randomly Selected Components to the Rescue

“…Which scale is selected may depend upon goal or context. For example, Kirkpatrick et al (2019) based their criteria on the number of different students who were reported to have engaged in a prosocial behavior. They selected this scale, rather than the total number of instances of prosocial behavior, because they were concerned that students would continually report the behavior of the same student(s) (e.g., popular students who engaged in high rates of prosocial behavior) while failing to report the prosocial behaviors of less popular students.…”

“…As with numerical criteria, there are numerous ways to scale or calculate criteria. Although class averages may be the most common (Little et al., 2015), others have used criteria based on the number of desired responses meeting a cumulative criterion, the percentage of students who met a criterion, the group’s highest score, the lowest score from the group, and the average score of a randomly selected subgroup of students (Aloisio, 2006; Cashwell et al., 2001; Kirkpatrick et al., 2019; Skinner, 2008). Which scale is selected may depend upon goal or context.…”