Using Tootling to Enhance First-Grade Students’ Use of a Social Skill: Evaluating the Catching Compliments Game

A withdrawal design was used to evaluate the effects of a tootling intervention targeting a specific, recently trained social skill, providing compliments, displayed by first-grade students while they engaged in a regularly scheduled, small-group math activity. The tootling intervention, called the Catching Compliments Game, included publicly posted feedback and an interdependent group-oriented contingency, which involved the entire class earning rewards for reporting their observations of classmates providing compliments. Visual analysis of a repeated-measures graph suggested that the intervention caused immediate increases in students’ complimenting peers while engaged in a small-group math activity. These results extend research on tootling interventions by providing evidence that they can cause increases in the behaviors that students are reporting, in this case, students complimenting peers. Discussion focuses on study limitations, future research, and the applied implications associated with supplementing social skills training with tootling.