A Comparison of the Effects of Descriptive Praise and General Praise on Acquisition in Young Children

Abstract

Previous research comparing the effects of descriptive praise versus general praise on the acquisition of skills has yielded mixed outcomes. That is, some studies have found descriptive praise to be more effective (Fueyo, Saundergras, & Bushell, 1975), whereas others have found negligible differences between the two types of praise (e.g., Polick, Carr, & Hanney, 2012). The purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend previous research in this area by (a) attempting to isolate the effects of the different types of praise (i.e., without the use of other procedures such as error correction, within-session prompts, or additional reinforcers such as tokens) for teaching letters, phonemes, and sight words to preschool children and (b) determining child preference for the different types of praise. Overall results replicated previous research by showing negligible differences between descriptive praise and general praise. In fact, praise, regardless of the type, was not a robust procedure for acquisition. Additionally, preference evaluation results showed that only 4 out of 7 participants preferred praise, and of these, two participants preferred descriptive praise, and two participants preferred general praise. Thus, preferences were idiosyncratic with respect to preferences for praise across participants.