OPUS Spring 2017
Letter from the Editor
Staff Articles
- Managing Mental Health in the Primary Care Sector
- An Interview with Dr. Joshua Aronson
- An Interview with Dr. Elise Cappella
- Childhood Emotional Abuse and Borderline Personality Disorder
- Split: A Review and Its Unexpected Merit
- The Influence of Leadership Style on Individuals’ Satisfaction on Small Teams
- The Impact of Postpartum Depression on the Mother-Child Relationship
- Don’t Worry, But Don’t Just Be Happy
- Teachers’ Use of Positive and Negative Feedback: Implications for Student Behavior
Ashlie Pankonin and Rebekah Myers
As early as the preschool years, teacher-student interactions set the trajectory for students’ academic careers (Mashburn et al., 2008; Palermo, Hanish, Martin, Fabes, & Reiser, 2007). An important aspect of these interactions is the feedback provided, or the positive and negative ways teachers respond to students’ behaviors. Research generally operationalizes teachers’ positive feedback as praise, or the act of expressing approval or admiration (Blote, 1995; Cannella, 1986), and negative feedback as verbal reprimands, negative statements about students’ abilities and/or effort, and negative nonverbal behaviors (Dobbs & Arnold, 2009; Irvine, 1986; Mazer, Mckenna-Buchanan, Quinlan, & Titsworth, 2014; Wentzel, 2002).
Teachers’ feedback has been found to influence their relationships with students and students’ outcomes, including their academic engagement and aspects of their self-perceptions (Dobbs & Arnold, 2009; Matheson & Shriver, 2005). Whereas teachers who use more positive feedback develop supportive relationships with their students, teachers who use more negative feedback tend to develop conflictual relationships with students (Allen et al., 2013; Wu, Hughes, & Kwok, 2010). Recent research suggests that students from low-income households experience conflictual, negative teacher- student interactions more often than their higher income peers (McGrath & Van Bergen, 2015). These frequent negative interactions may account for low- income students’ lower academic success (LoCasale- Crouch et al., 2007; Wu et al., 2010). Subsequently, most studies have explored how negative teacher-student interactions influence low-income students’ lower success, yet few studies have explored how receiving positive feedback may change these outcomes. Therefore, in order to promote greater academic success, this study will explore how both positive and negative teacher feedback contribute to low-income preschoolers’ behaviors in the classroom.
Effects of Teacher-Student Interactions on Student Behavior
Teachers play a critical role in shaping students’ academic careers, as they are responsible
for not only educating their students, but also developing students’ motivation to learn (DiBiase & Miller, 2012; Harter, 2012; Verschueren, Doumen, & Buyse, 2012). More specifically, through differing levels of support and conflict, teacher-student relationships inform how students come to view their place in the classroom, their abilities, and their beliefs about school (Burnett, 1999; Hughes, 2011; Wang & Eccles, 2013). In fact, Wu et al. (2010) found that when teachers provide high levels of support, they engage with students with more eye contact, clearer directions, and positive feedback. These positive behaviors, then, reinforce students’ behaviors by making them feel encouraged, interested in their immediate task, and motivated to continue their behavior (Hamre & Pianta, 2001; O’Connor & McCartney, 2007).
In preschool classrooms, teacher-student relationships set the foundation for children’s academic careers (Hughes, 2011; Mashburn et al., 2008; Palermo et al., 2007). Most importantly, the attachments teachers establish with preschool children influence how secure children feel in the school context and the level of trust they develop with teachers (Bowlby, 1965; McGrath & Van Bergen, 2015; Murray, Kosty, & Hauser-Mclean, 2015). Furthermore, creating a secure attachment with a preschool child impacts how comfortable the child feels attempting challenging tasks and how motivated the child is to succeed (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Harter, 2012). Thus, preschool teachers’ supportive interactions impact students’ long-term outcomes by shaping children’s views about and motivation toward school, as well as the level of trust students will have with future teachers (Palermo et al., 2007; Rubie-Davies et al., 2014).
Developing positive teacher-student relationships may be especially important for preschoolers from low- income backgrounds. Because low-income students tend to lack access to resources and be placed in low-quality classrooms, they experience more academic disadvantage than their higher income peers (Burchinal, Peisner-Feinberg, Pianta, & Howes, 2002; Janus & Duku, 2007; Murray et al., 2016). However, research suggests that positive teacher-student relationships may be a protective factor against low-income student’s poor school outcomes (Hamre & Pianta, 2005; O’Connor & McCartney, 2007). According to Burchinal et al. (2002), highly supportive teachers are able to keep children at risk of low achievement engaged in their work and provide better assistance for developing children’s skills. Thus, low-income students appear to experience larger rates of growth when exposed to positive teacher- student relationships, and some research claims that such growth occurs because the students are being exposed to substantial amounts of positive feedback (Conroy, Sutherland, Vo, Carr, & Ogston, 2014; Gable, Hester, Rock, & Hughes, 2009).
Effects of Teacher Feedback on Student Behavior
Positive feedback. While both positive and negative feedback are used in response to students’ behaviors, each has different effects on students’ subsequent behavior. Positive feedback is not only used to praise students’ efforts and behaviors, but is also an effective way to modify behavior. For example, increased use of praise directly impacts student behavior by leading to more on-task behavior, and, when used in conjunction with clear, straightforward, and positively- phrased commands, significantly improves students’ compliance to rules (Fagot, 1973; Ferguson & Houghton, 1992; Matheson & Shriver, 2005). Using praise can also decrease instances of problem behaviors by motivating students to behave in ways that will elicit more praise in the future, such as continuing the praised behavior (Howell, Caldarella, Korth, & Young, 2014). Ultimately, by decreasing problem behaviors, praise improves future teacher-student interactions by causing more positive and less negative teacher-student interactions to occur (Conroy et al., 2014).
Additionally, the use of positive feedback has implications beyond direct behavior management, as it affects students’ behaviors indirectly by influencing their self-perceptions. For example, praise impacts students’ self-regard and self-competence, or their beliefs about their ability to be successful at tasks, because students believe themselves to be more capable of success when they receive more praise (Parsons, Kaczala, & Meece, 1982; Worrall, Worrall, & Meldrum, 1983). When children receive high praise on their work, they also perceive themselves to be harder workers and smarter than their peers who do not receive praise (Pintrich & Blumenfeld, 1985; Spilt, Leflot, Onghena, & Colpin, 2016). Thus, because self- perceptions have a long-term, rather than immediate, impact on behavior, positive feedback can have lasting impacts on students’ behaviors by influencing their self-perceptions.
However, positive feedback can be detrimental to students’ learning if it is used without a specific purpose, too frequently, or when it is not necessarily
deserved (Cannella, 1986). When nonspecific praise is provided, such as indiscriminately saying “good job” or “beautiful,” students do not understand what behaviors are approved of and either continue their current behavior or give up trying to demonstrate behaviors that receive praise altogether (Hamilton & Gordon, 1978; Parsons et al., 1982). Moreover, if praise is interpreted as a reward and used so often that students become dependent on it, it can become a source of extrinsic motivation (Cannella, 1986). This can cause students to lose interest in learning when the reward is no longer available (Cannella, 1986; Hamilton & Gordon, 1978; Howell et al., 2014). Further, if a student receives unwarranted praise, such as after performing poorly on a test, they may become aware and ashamed of their inabilities, leading to a disinterest in learning (Cannella, 1986). Consequently, in order for praise to impact student behavior effectively, it must be used appropriately, in that it must be specific, warranted, and not overused.
Negative feedback. Even though positive feedback, when used appropriately, can have the most positive impact on student outcomes, negative feedback is used more often in the classroom with relatively direct, negative effects (Dobbs & Arnold, 2009; Irvine, 1986; Mazer et al., 2014; Wentzel, 2002). Teachers typically use negative feedback to change a student’s behavior, whether that be to stop a disruptive behavior or to make them try harder at a task (Conroy et al., 2014). However, research demonstrates that when teachers reprimand students, students often continue to engage in the disruptive behavior (Gable et al., 2009; Spilt et al., 2016). Because reprimands and negative statements about students’ efforts tend to be nonspecific, such as saying, “Don’t do that,” without providing any justification for ending the disruptive behavior or what behavior should be done instead, they tend to perpetuate students’ lack of motivation for the task at hand and decrease students’ overall interest in academic tasks (Brockner, Derr, & Laing, 1987; Hamilton & Gordon, 1978; Spilt et al., 2016; Weidinger, Spinath, & Steinmayr, 2016).
Negative feedback also affects students’ behaviors indirectly by decreasing student’s self-concepts and feelings of self-worth (Doumen, Buyse, Colpin, & Verschueren, 2011; Spilt et al., 2016; Weidinger et al., 2016). More specifically, teachers’ consistent use of negative feedback makes students doubt their teachers’ concern for them, feel unworthy of praise, have a lower sense of intrinsic motivation, and require a reward in order to do a task (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Spilt et al., 2016). Thus, teachers’ consistent use of negative feedback can have long-term effects on students’ behavior by causing students to develop negative self-perceptions. Having negative self-perceptions is especially concerning because it has been documented that self-perceptions have more influence on students’ success in the classroom than their actual skills (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; Harter, 2012).
Current Study
Teachers’ use of feedback has both direct and indirect consequences for students’ behaviors. Positive feedback generally has a positive impact on students’ behavior, engagement, and self-perceptions, if used effectively. Negative feedback, conversely, tends to have the opposite effects. Despite the fact that preschool teachers to college professors provide positive and negative feedback to their students, the majority of research on the effects of teacher feedback on student behavior has focused on elementary school-aged populations. Thus, more research on the effects of teacher feedback during the formidable preschool years is needed.
Furthermore, research has found that low-income students receive more negative feedback due to their placement in low-quality classrooms (i.e., classrooms with a lack of resources) and their increased behavioral problems that require more reprimands (Hamre & Pianta, 2001; LoCasale-Crouch et al., 2007). The effects of feedback, particularly in the context of positive teacher-student relationships, may be more pronounced for low-income student populations, though, in that they may be highly receptive to praise, no matter how it is used, and capable of exponential success when exposed to it (Blote, 1995; Cannella, 1986; Conroy et al., 2014; Palermo et al., 2007). However, few studies have explored the impact of teachers’ use of positive feedback on low-income students’ school outcomes. Finally, there is an abundance of quantitative, experimental research but a dearth of qualitative research on this topic, warranting more qualitative research that can better capture the relation between teacher feedback and student behavior. Thus, this qualitative study addressed the following research question: What is the relation between teachers’ use of positive and negative feedback and low-income preschoolers’ behavior in the classroom?
METHOD Participants and Setting
The sample for this study included children and teachers from classrooms at two different New York City Early Education Centers serving low-income families. While the schools were located in Brooklyn and the Bronx, the classrooms observed were relatively similar despite the geographical differences. More specifically, all classrooms were set up to meet the Department of Education’s standards for preschool
classrooms, so a majority of the same resources wereavailable, the same themes were taught, and similar schedules were followed. The teacher to student ratio varied from one to three teachers, not including the researchers, for 15-20 students. Across the classrooms, the teachers were Latina women in their late thirties, and the majority of the children were Latino or African American, ranging from three to five years of age.
Procedure and Coding
Each researcher spent three hours per week volunteering at one of the two schools, but the time of day each researcher visited the classrooms varied. One researcher volunteered at her preschool during the hours of most instruction, specifically 8:30 AM to 11:30 AM, while the other researcher volunteered during dismissal and daycare hours, specifically 2:30 PM to 5:30 PM. As a volunteer, the researchers were responsible for playing with the children, reading them stories, and doing any small tasks the teachers asked of them. For the purpose of this study, the researchers also observed and reflected on any salient teacher-student interactions, specifically instances of teachers’ use of positive and negative feedback and students’ behaviors, while at their preschools. To remain covert and to avoid teachers changing their behaviors in any way, the researchers waited to write their observational field notes until after they had left the school, and did so within a week of the observation.
Observational field notes were written over five weeks, in which the researchers each visited their schools five times and recorded a total of 31 instances of feedback. After compiling the field notes, each observation of teacher feedback was thematically coded for three themes: (1) the time of the observation (to account for the fact that the researchers were at their preschools at different times); (2) the type of feedback provided (i.e., positive or negative); and (3) the student’s behavior (i.e., the behavior causing the feedback stopped, continued, or was affected in an unobservable way). The behavior was coded as being affected in an unobservable way if there was no immediately observable impact on the student’ s behavior. After coding for these themes, the number of times each theme arose was calculated, and patterns and themes that emerged from the observations were deductively coded. To establish reliability, 20% of the data was coded separately and compared. Inter-rater reliability was 95%.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Using the predetermined coding scheme, five different time points of feedback observations emerged: 52% of observations took place during free play, 19% during “circle” time, 16% during meal or snack time, 10% during transitions, and 3% during nap time (See Appendix A). Overall, there were 20 (65%) instances of negative feedback and 11 (35%) instances of positive feedback with negative feedback occurring more in every time point of the school day. In fact, negative feedback outweighed the instances of positive feedback by at least twice as many occurrences in every part of the day but one (free play), which is in line with previous research stating negative feedback occurs significantly more often in low-income preschool classrooms (Blote, 1995; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; LoCasale-Crouch et al., 2007).
While negative feedback arose more often during all time points of the school day, the time of free play presented different findings. Not only did free play contain the most instances of feedback, but there were also almost as many instances of positive feedback as instances of negative feedback. The differences in level and type of feedback provided during each time point may illuminate the importance of time of day in the provision of feedback, as each activity took place at different times of the day. For instance, circle time occurred in the morning, free play in the afternoon, and nap time in the middle of the day (after lunch time). It is possible that teachers may be more likely to provide feedback during parts of the day in which they have more energy (Biggers, 1980). Another explanation for this distribution of feedback, though, could be the nature of the activity, in that certain activities may lend themselves to providing more opportunities for feedback. For example, free play consisted of children engaging in self-selected and managed activities. Free play may provide more opportunities for feedback than an activity like nap time, as it allows teachers to comment on children’s choices of activities and how they are succeeding at their play, as well as requiring more behavior management (Kontos, 1999).
Further coding demonstrated that the use of positive and negative feedback uniquely impacted students’ subsequent behaviors. Of the instances in which positive feedback was observed, the students continued their behaviors 55% of the time, and the remaining 45% of uses of positive feedback had an unobservable effect on the students’ behaviors. In response to negative feedback, the students stopped their behaviors 70% of the time, continued their behaviors 25% of the time, and affected students’ behaviors in an unobservable way 5% of the time. These
respective behaviors in response to receiving positive and negative feedback are not surprising because previous research states that the general goal of positive feedback is to reinforce and encourage the continuation of a behavior, while negative feedback is to
decrease, stop, and/or discourage a behavior (Conroy et al., 2014; Matheson & Shriver, 2005).
Despite the fact that teachers used positive and negative feedback to encourage and discourage behavior, respectively, the feedback had varying levels of success in accomplishing these goals. For example, in the majority of instances where negative feedback was provided, students continued their behaviors 20% of the time. This is consistent with research that shows students may continue their behavior despite receiving negative feedback (Gable et al., 2009; Spilt et al., 2016). The ways the feedback was phrased could explain these behavioral responses. For example, when the behavior continued despite the use of negative feedback, the feedback did not explicitly address the problematic behavior (e.g., “Come on, let’s be serious now;” “Hey!”). Although, when the negative feedback provided an explanation of why the behavior should be stopped (e.g., “Don’t do that. I don’t think that is safe”), allowed the student to think about the morality of the behavior (e.g., “Are you doing the right thing?”), or was a simple form of “no” (e.g., “no;” “uh uh uh;” “mm mm”), the behavior stopped.
In fact, there were two specific instances that exemplify how the phrasing of the negative feedback had differing effects on the students’ behaviors. In both instances, the students were supposed to be eating snack but were instead playing with their food, and both teachers used negative feedback to stop the students’ problematic behaviors. One teacher forcefully said, “Hey!” to grab the student’s attention and imply that she disapproved of what the student was doing. When the student continued to play with her food, the teacher called the child by name and said, “You better eat all of that right now!” Yet, the student never ate her snack and continued playing with it until snack time ended. The other teacher addressed the problem by asking the student, “Are we supposed to play with our food?” Although the student did not verbally reply, he stopped playing with his snack and began eating it instead. Because the latter teacher phrased her negative feedback in a more straightforward manner and allowed the student to evaluate his behavior against the expectations of the classroom, instead of being ambiguous and forceful, it effectively accomplished the goal of negative feedback.
It is interesting that the phrasing of negative feedback played an integral role in whether or not a student continued their behavior because past literature fails to explore this nuance. Most research on the impact of negative feedback argues that negative feedback has detrimental effects on students’ behavior and self- perceptions regardless of how it is stated (Gable et al., 2009; Spilt et al., 2016). However, phrasing negative feedback in a way that allows the student to process and understand their behavior, which is emphasized in the positive feedback literature for creating effective feedback (Cannella, 1986; Hamilton & Gordon, 1978; Parsons et al., 1982), did not appear to have an extremely negative impact on the students. Thus, the phrasing of negative feedback may protect against the highly cited detrimental results of negative feedback and may subsequently be a necessary tool for teachers to use to end highly disruptive behavior.
Conversely, despite past research positing that the phrasing of positive feedback is important for it to effectively increase students’ on-task behavior (Cannella, 1986; Hamilton & Gordon, 1978), the phrasing of positive feedback was not as influential in determining how students later behaved. In general, positive feedback consisted of simple praise statements, (e.g., “Good job!” “Beautiful!”), giving high fives, and providing stickers. There was an almost equal amount of instances where students continued their behavior and instances where the positive feedback had an unobservable effect on the behavior. While there were no instances of positive feedback causing the targeted students to stop their behavior, it appeared to occasionally have an impact on the behavior of other students. In one instance, children were passing items around during circle time and sharing their thoughts on items aloud. One child sat quietly and raised his hand, and the teacher responded by exclaiming, “Wow! I love how XXX raised his hand!” After hearing this praise, four other children immediately fixed their posture and raised their hands.
It appears, then, that the phrasing of positive feedback may be more important in stopping other children’s behaviors, as opposed to influencing the targeted child’s behavior, so that they may be motivated to change their behavior and receive positive feedback. As past research shows, as long as the praise is not being used to manipulate behavior and/or does not communicate incompetency, it will influence students’ continuation of the behavior, especially in the future (Cannella, 1986; Howell et al., 2014). Thus, positive feedback in general may be beneficial for the targeted child in continuing their behavior, but it may be mostly used to redirect other students’ disruptive behaviors, which past research has documented is the best use of positive feedback (Fagot, 1973; Ferguson & Houghton, 1992; Matheson & Shriver, 2005).
Furthermore, the phrasing of positive feedback may not be as important in these low-income classrooms because, as past literature claims, low-income students are receptive to any type of positive feedback regardless of phrasing (Cannella, 1986). Simply hearing “good job” is perhaps enough to encourage the continuation of a behavior for low-income students because they are
particularly sensitive to positive interactions with their teachers (Burchinal et al., 2010; Hamre & Pianta, 2005; Murray et al., 2016). However, without a comparison group of higher-income students, this claim is mere speculation and should be further explored to determine if the phrasing of positive feedback is not necessary with low-income students.
Finally, the phrasing of positive feedback may not have had such an observable impact on targeted students’ behaviors because the feedback may have instead influenced the students’ self-perceptions. This would explain the high rate of unobservable effects on behavior for positive feedback, as feedback indirectly impacts behavior by influencing self-perceptions. Because self- perceptions do not necessarily have an immediate effect on behavior, it may be that positive feedback is more important in the long-term, as opposed to negative feedback which aims to stop a current behavior (Parsons et al., 1982; Pintrich & Blumenfeld, 1985; Spilt et al., 2016; Worrall et al., 1983). However, if positive feedback holds more implications for long-term outcomes, it is interesting that even though circle time is one of the most explicit instructional times of the day, the focus of the feedback provided during that time seemed to have only been on behavior management, rather than on developing students’ self-perceptions of learning. The lack of positive feedback during circle time may be one explanation for low-income students’ tendency to have low self-perceptions toward their academic abilities (Campbell, Pungello, & Miller-Johnson, 2002). Ultimately, though, it is difficult to detect how self- perceptions are being affected and their effects on immediately observable behavior, demonstrating a need for further investigation of how positive feedback influences behavior.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Examining the impact of teachers’ use of positive and negative feedback on low-income preschoolers’ behaviors in the classroom, the findings of this study aligned with most existing literature. Consistent with the findings of other studies, overall, teachers used more negative feedback than positive feedback in the classroom and the use of positive feedback had significant effects in promoting students’ continuation of their behaviors (Blote, 1995; Hamre & Pianta, 2001; LoCasale-Crouch et al., 2007). However, this study differs from past research, as it suggests the use of negative feedback may be necessary to classroom functioning, and the detrimental effects typically associated with negative feedback can be avoided if teachers pay attention to their phrasing of the feedback.
This study provides specific insights into the relation between feedback and students’ behaviors in an under-researched population. Yet, significantly more research is needed on low-income preschoolers to support this study’s claims. In addition, this study was primarily exploratory, and only immediately observable behavior was recorded. Future research should use more direct assessments to measure feedback’s direct and indirect effects on students’ behaviors, both short-term and long-term, to provide more concrete evidence of the relations beyond speculation. Direct assessments would also avoid any possible misinterpretation that may have occurred due to the delay between when interactions were observed and when field notes were written. Furthermore, although the times that researchers volunteered at their preschools, when combined, covered the majority of the preschool day, neither researcher was present for the whole day. Additionally, the researchers often volunteered in different classrooms at their preschool each week, which may have differed in ways unknown to the researchers. Thus, future research should limit their focus to following a specific classroom and teacher over the entire school day in order to more accurately assess the effects of feedback.
Regardless of this study’s limitations, the findings holds implications for teachers’ practices and school policy. Primarily, this study could hold implications for teachers’ practices, as it may help them learn about the general impact of their feedback on students’ classroom success and be more cognizant of their behaviors when interacting with various students if the findings of this study were shared with them. Further, it may hold implications for policy, as it could be used to influence the creation of a required professional development that educates teachers on effective feedback strategies, as well as the use of classroom assessments that show teachers how they are performing on their feedback.