The Effect of Rewarding In-Class Participation to Decrease Off-task Conversations in Middle School Age Females
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2016-07
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Masters of Education
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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine if students in an eighth-grade, all-female Spanish I class of 15 would decrease off-topic conversations after an intervention to award in-class participation. Off-task conversations were defined as any time students spoke out of turn in a reciprocal manner that was not related to the lesson. For the intervention, the researcher gave out tickets to students when they contributed to class discussion. The tickets were then put in drawings for weekly prizes. There were two weeks of weighted baseline data and four weeks of intervention data. Data was prorated to adjust for absences. The mean of off-task conversations per student during the weighted baseline (Mean= 144.38, SD=151.28) was significantly higher than during the intervention (Mean= 107.37, SD= 119.89). [t(14) = 3.09, p = .008)]. Because the data was significant (as shown by p-value), the null hypothesis was rejected. Implications and ideas for future research are discussed.