Doctoral Dissertations
Date of Award
8-2022
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Major
School Psychology
Major Professor
Christopher H Skinner
Committee Members
Robert D Richardson, Brian E Wilhoit, David F Cihak
Abstract
Tootling is a class-wide intervention where students provide written positive peer reports of classmates’ prosocial behaviors, which are then reinforced with interdependent group-oriented contingencies. This dissertation includes four chapters. The first three chapters are written as intact papers. The first paper provides both a review of tootling research and a description of how educators can apply a tootling intervention in their classrooms. The next two chapters describe empirical studies conducted with elementary students in an after-school program. In Chapter Two, a withdrawal design was used to evaluate the effects of a tootling intervention that simultaneously targeted two recently taught social skills: encouraging and complimenting peers. Results suggest that the tootling intervention increased student engagement in both of these recently trained social skills while the students played a small group game. The next study, Chapter Three, was designed to investigate the effects of the structure of the activity that students engage in while tootling on levels of complimenting and encouraging. Results suggest that the tootling intervention was more effective in enhancing students’ complimenting and encouraging their peers when they engaged in a cooperative activity, as opposed to a parallel play activity or an activity that involved individual competition. Together, these studies suggest that tootling can be used to enhance student performance of recently taught social skills in natural social contexts. Additionally, these results suggest that to maximize students’ performance of recently taught social skills, educators should consider structuring classroom activities so that they provide more opportunities for engagement in those specific social skills. Chapter Four provides directions for future researchers. Specifically, this chapter focuses on longitudinal research evaluating the effects of supplementing social skills training with tootling on the development of socially competent children and the broad and meaningful psychological, social, and academic benefits associated with this social competence.
Recommended Citation
Crewdson, Margaret, "Enhancing Social Skill Performance In Vivo: An Investigation of Tootling Across Activity Structures. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2022.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/11594