Natural rates of approval and disapproval in British infant, junior and secondary classrooms.
Investigations in the 1970s showed, amongst other findings, teachers giving more disapproval than approval to their pupils. In the late 1980s, different investigators, whilst concurring with other findings, found approval rates to be higher than disapproval at all school levels, an important finding in view of the number of investigations which have shown the positive value to pupils of contingent verbal approval and the negative or ineffective value of disapproval. We aimed to examine teacher approval and disapproval a further ten years later and unlike previous investigations, which used classroom observers, to utilise a permanent method of recording. The permanent recording was partly to facilitate precision of recording and partly to enable a more complex analysis of data than had previously been achieved. Participants were 10 infant school teachers, 10 junior school teachers and 10 secondary school teachers. The teachers taught their classes whilst wearing radio microphones. The tape recordings of the lessons were systematically observed using eight defined categories of behaviour. Category definitions were initially established by two independent observers who attained a level of above 80% agreement. Analyses of the data were both within group and between groups. Findings were generally in line with those of the investigations of the 1980s. Aspects not previously investigated included findings that approval was given predominantly to pupils working individually rather than in groups, that redirection (a teacher response following disapproval which describes an approved behaviour) was markedly lower in secondary schools than in junior and infant schools, whilst redirection occurred at about the same rate in junior and infant schools. That the results for approval and disapproval rates agree with those of the 1980s in which differing methodologies were used in different school systems is encouraging evidence that teachers are using appropriate verbal responses to their pupils. Some of the more detailed results of the investigation do, however, indicate areas for concern.