The study found that when middle school teachers praised students at least as often as they reprimanded them, class-wide on-task behavior improved by 60–70%. Students speaking out of turn, texting, ...

The number of times a teacher compliments or recognizes a student’s good behavior, compared to how often the teacher reprimands the student, the more likely that student is going to stay focused on ...

Further, teachers often expect that by middle school, kids are old enough to behave without being coddled. As a result, positive reinforcement techniques widely used in elementary school are often ...