Undergraduate Research Project

Socially Appropriate Behavior Using Positive Social Interactions and Correcting by

Modeling in a Preschool-Aged Child

Victoria Pecot

Louisiana State University

Undergraduate Research Project

Abstract

BACKGROUND: This study applies to the implementation of social appropriate

behavior in classrooms, and correcting behaviors that are not socially appropriate. Preschool-

aged children have the highest risk of bad social behaviors, and need classrooms to implement

appropriate ones. OBJECTIVE: The goal of implementing social behavior interventions is to

create better social skills within preschoolers, with the purpose of dissolving inappropriate

behaviors. Through positive social interactions with the child, and correcting by modelling and

showing examples of others, the inappropriate behavior should dissolve itself. METHODS: A

sample of one preschool-aged boy was observed multiple times for ten minutes each for ten

sessions. Each session was divided into 30 second intervals. If he talked out of turn during whole

group discussions, or acted out in some way, a mark was put down for inappropriate behavior if

it continued after correction. There were both positive and negative findings, all put on a graph at

the end of the last observation. The observations took place during whole group meetings or

reading, and not during centers because this is when the child would act out. This study is

supported by research on the impact of social behavioral interventions for preschool children

(Hall, 2020). RESULTS: Results showed an increase in social appropriate behavior.

CONCLUSION: These findings depict how important it is for social appropriate behavior

interventions to take place in preschools. This can encourage and increase better social skills, and

a better environment in the classroom.

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Introduction

Previous research completed by Tonya Hall showed that preschool students are expelled

at higher rates than any other grade, due to their social behavior problems within the classroom.

Research by Hall suggests that the preschoolers who do receive intervention in social appropriate

behavior experience lower rates of expulsion, and an increase of social appropriate behavior

(Hall, pg. 2). This is important to implement because research shows that inappropriate social

behavior problems from preschool that are not resolved are predictive of poor literacy

development and academic achievement (Hall, pg. 2 [Hinshaw, 1992]). This is a precursor of

school failure, and other social difficulties later on. Preschool students need teachers with high-

quality backgrounds of education, so that their academic and social skills can flourish and

develop on track. If a social behavior is not resolved or corrected, an actual disability can go

without being noticed, which can cause serious issues (Hall, pg. 2). The research and findings of

this overall had a positive effect on the importance of implementing social appropriate behavior

skills. According to Hall, “83% of the social behavior intervention studies that sought to improve

the social skills of the target children were reported to be effective,” (Hall, pg. 6). The social

appropriate behavior implementation research then raises the question, “Would positive

interactions or corrections by modelling have an effect on a preschool student?”

Method

Setting

This study was conducted at LSU Early Childhood Education Laboratory Preschool. This

is located in East Baton Rouge parish, in Louisiana. The classroom of the study was in my
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placement, in Preschool II. There were about twelve students enrolled in this classroom, that

regularly attend. The demographic factor of the students consists of about eight boys and four

girls, no inclusion students, and three students being from a different cultural background. The

class is taught by one lead teacher, and an assistant teacher who teachers in the second half of the

day. The classroom was assessed using the following environmental assessment tools: ECERS-3,

NAEYC, CLASS, ELLCO, and ROSIE, to be able to see the quality of the curriculum and

overall class environment. The classroom received a score of 6.65 out of 7 for the ‘Interaction’

domain of the ECERS-3 tool, as well as a high score for the NAEYC tool. The classroom

received a score of 6 out of 7 for the ‘Behavior Management’ domain of the CLASS tool. This is

important to note that these assessments with the appropriate domains pertaining to social

behavior are at a high score, to show that these children are in a high-quality classroom

environment.

Participant

The subject of this research study is a four-year old male in a preschool class at LSU

Early Childhood Education Laboratory Preschool. He did not have an IEP. This student was

picked due to his constant speaking out of turn, his restlessness, and slight disrespectfulness to

the teacher during lessons. He is constantly being corrected by the lead and assistant teacher

during these lessons, which is why he is a fair choice. After being corrected, he will still choose

the inappropriate behavior a few moments later, and disrupt the lesson. However, this is not the

same subject in the “Ages and Stages Questionnaire or DSC”, because that child did not have

any issues whatsoever presented. This subject was chosen overall because of the social skills I

felt were needed to improve.

Definition of Socially Appropriate Behavior

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Socially appropriate behavior falls under the development of emotional and social skills.

All children must develop these in a proper way so that they may be functioning members of

society. Children are to benefit from learning proper social skills, which will also affect their

behavior with others. Teachers are to foster this development, and provide an environment of

positive social interactions. There are various kinds of social appropriate behaviors, and different

ways they can be implanted to fix a wrong behavior (Hall, pg. 2). The definition of social

appropriate behaviors is, “When children function appropriately with others and their

environment during designated class activities particularly when presented with social occasions

including but not limited to free play,” (Hall, pg. 2). It is said that children who show positive

social behaviors possess three different types of behavioral characteristics: positive social skills,

positive social interactions, and high levels of social competence (Hall, pg. 2). The way a child

presents themselves in different settings and interactions shows if or if not they have socially

appropriate behavior.

Definition of Socially Inappropriate Behavior

Socially inappropriate behavior are various behaviors that are presented in a way that

bring about issues. For example, if a person responds or reacts to certain interactions in a way

that startles or interrupts the other person, this is an inappropriate behavior. These are what

happen when proper social skills have not been developed yet, or have not been developed with

any corrections (Kostelnik, 2019). Any skill needs practice, and if a child is not in an

environment with high-quality professionals corrections or instructing appropriate behaviors, the

child will result in having negative social behavior skills. The definition of socially inappropriate

behavior is persistent, unwanted behaviors that can become disruptive, and subject to correction
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or treatment (Hall, pg.3). If a socially inappropriate behavior goes unresolved, the child may deal

with serious social difficulties later on.

Experimental Conditions

The conditions of the experiment contained a certain ‘baseline’ which was what either of

the teachers would do to address or fix this target issue of social appropriate behavior. Each day

there is a morning meeting before center time, where the lead teacher instructs a lesson to the

whole group. She will start off with a transitional song into morning meeting, and then begin to

speak about what the preschoolers will be talking/learning about today. The students are all

seated in a circle on the rug around the lead teacher. The subject usually will try to speak out of

turn, say silly things or make noises, or try to talk to a student besides him. Either the lead

teacher or the assistant teacher will correct this, by saying “[insert name] I am talking,” or

“[insert name] I am listening to this child right now,” or asking the child if they need to sit out.

The assistant teacher or I will normally sit behind him to correct him when he does these things,

so that the lead teacher can continue talking. These corrections would all work for a few brief

moments, and then the subject would do the same thing again. This behavior would always

distract the whole class.

Intervention

The intervention of the subject starts off by observing the subject ten separate times.

During each time, data has to be collected by checking off if the child demonstrated social

appropriate or inappropriate behavior after the social appropriate implementations took place

(See Appendix A). This took place in 30 second intervals, 10 minutes total. The observer would

check off if the behavior being demonstrated for every 30 seconds was appropriate or

inappropriate. The intervention included providing the target with more positive social
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interactions and correcting by modeling. If the subject showed an inappropriate social behavior

the observer would correct the behavior my modeling, i.e., either whispering to the subject that

another student was behaving very well and to notice this, or by tapping the student to have them

see the observer paying attention to the lead teacher. Another way to correct these behaviors was

by positive social interactions. The observer would notice an inappropriate behavior happening,

tap the subject, smile at them and pat their back, and then point to who was speaking. If after

these implementations took place, and the socially appropriate behavior was shown, or was

increased, it would be marked (See Appendix A).

Data Collection

Data for this study was collected in a way of marking if the target demonstrated a socially

appropriate behavior or socially inappropriate behavior before and after correction was needed.

This took place in a period of 10 sessions for 10 minutes. Each session was divided into 30

second intervals. If the target demonstrated socially appropriate behavior after correction, it

would be recorded.

Observation Procedure

Data for the research was collected each day for ten minutes during whole group morning

meetings. The observer would sit behind the subject to watch and correct behaviors. The subject

only needed to be observed during morning meetings, because whole group meetings were the

only times he would act out.

Reliability

No reliability was collected for this study.

Findings
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Figure 1:

The figure shown above depicts a graph from the findings of the data collected between

the baseline of socially appropriate behavior regular corrections and the implementation of the

positive social interactions and correction modeling. As shown for the baseline, the results of

social appropriate behavior only accorded 50% of the time, which means the social inappropriate

behavior occurred just as equally as much, even though teachers were using their own form of

correction. As shown for the implementation, socially appropriate behavior occurred after

intervention 70% of the time, with social inappropriate behavior only occurring 30% of the time.

This means after the implementation, socially appropriate behavior increased by 20%. This was a

great increase from the regular baseline that the teachers have been doing. In total, the amount of

socially appropriate behaviors for both occurred 60% of the time, with inappropriate behaviors

occurring 40% of the time in total for both.

Discussion

The study and findings show that there was an improvement using social appropriate

behavior skills and implementation in this preschool classroom. Inappropriate behavior did
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decrease with intervention. Compared to the study by Tonya Hall, the findings for her

intervention research concluded that, “83% of the social behavior intervention studies sought to

improve the social skills of the target children were reported to be effective,” (Hall, pg. 6). This

shows that there was only a 13% difference between my improvement and theirs. This measure

was consistent with DAP because social appropriate behavior is necessary between teachers, and

students in the environment of the classroom. This intervention is appropriate for young children,

especially in preschool where developmentally, behavior management is just starting to form.

The child seemed to like it because he was reacting positively behavior wise after

implementation in the classroom.

Conclusions

The social appropriate behavior intervention can be implemented with children speaking

out of turn or acting silly when they should not be. This will only be effective if done during

whole group meetings, or any instruction or activities where the child has to be quiet. This

intervention does not cater to one student, and can be implemented on any student that talks out

or interrupts. Modeling and positive interactions are a beneficial way to correct these issues, as

shown above. The lead teacher or any teacher can further this by adding their own ways to

implement this study and findings. The further questions that are raised by this study are, “Can

any more implementations be added to correct interrupting behavior?”

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References

Hall, T. (2020). Review of Experimental Social Behavioral Interventions for Preschool Children:
An Evidenced-Based Synthesis. SAGE Open, 10(1), 1–13.
https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019899420

Kostelnik, M. J. (2019). Developmentally appropriate curriculum: best practices in early

childhood education. Pearson.
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Appendix A:

Project 2: Socially Appropriate Communication

Child name:_Eddy Newman________Condition: talking out of turn

Both Socially appropriate behavior and inappropriate behavior were calculated on a partial

interval basis; NA was scored on a whole interval basis.

:00 :30
0 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
1 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
2 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
3 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
4 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
5 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
6 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
7 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
8 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
9 SAC IC NA SAC IC NA
Summary

# SAC / # of observed intervals X 100% = _12/20_=_60%__________

# IC/# of observed intervals X 100% =_8/20_= 40%________

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Reflection

At first

At first, this project seemed completely overwhelming. It definitely took me a lot of

time to complete this, and figure out what I was doing. I had never done something like this

before, so I was very stressed out about doing the wrong thing. I started out by figuring out

what I wanted my topic to be on. I knew I wanted to do social appropriate behaviors because

there is one student that does act out in the class. I did not use my mentor teacher’s help on

accident because I was running out of time, and also did not realize I needed her help. I should

have communicated better and organized myself like I should have. However, I feel like this

project overall is very nicely done, and I really like it. My research article aided me in finding

information about social appropriate behaviors, and research on them. I found out that

preschoolers are one of the worst behaved children, which surprised me very much. This

surprised me because every child I have met in my class is so sweet, and we do not have any

big issues in the class. None of their behavior really stands out that would result in an

expulsion, like the research article was talking about. However, reading on from the article, I

began to see why this was the case. Children at this age are just starting to fully develop their

social skills and self-regulation, so if they are not guided correctly in management for this, they

will act out badly.

And then

And then, after fully reading my research article and highlighting important parts, I was

on my way to fully develop my project. I started observing my subject and writing down
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certain things he would do. I then tried to figure out my implementations I would use on him,

and thought about which ones would work. I decided on using positive interactions because I

believe that children with any type of behavior issue possibly just need a little love and

attention, instead of immediate scolding. With this, I decided that if I was nice to him when he

was disruptive during morning meeting, that he might act better if I told him to return to paying

attention after a kind interaction. The other implementation I used that I thought of was

correcting by modeling. I chose this one because we as humans compare ourselves to each

other. We sometimes use others as a basis, or model, for how to act. Because of this, I decided

that if the subject was acting out, I would find someone behaving well, and ask him to look at

how they are acting at that moment. This implementation of both parts seemed to work pretty

well, as I found in my results.

And now

And now, or in conclusion, I feel as though this has been one of my strongest projects

of the semester. My lesson plans, research on children with different assessments throughout

the semester, all aided me in completing this. I feel as though those assignments allowed me to

grasp a thicker understanding of children and their behaviors. Also, being in the classroom all

semester also really aided me in understanding how children tick. My results for this project

were very strong, which only shows how I understood my children and behavior of what would

work. Overall, my communication skills have grown. I used to be really scared of talking in

front of the class. My first lesson plan had me very nervous and made me forget certain things

to say or do for the children. However, I have watched my confidence grown so much since
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then, as I have gotten so comfortable with talking in front of my children. Even after another

preschool class was pushed into ours, I still had the confidence to even talk in front of all these

new children. Overall, this semester was a big growth period. It was extremely hard for me to

handle, and this project was not an easy one. However, I definitely have seen growth in myself.

I never gave up, even if things were very hard on me. This project allowed me to see a

different side of myself, including something I never thought I would be able to complete.