Establishing Quiet Listening Behavior in Regular Classes: An Intervention Including a Prompt to be Quiet ("Silent Pose")

Abstract

Study objective: Decreasing the frequency of students’ inappropriate remarks and establishing quiet listening behavior. Design: Multiple baseline design across classrooms. Setting: Regular public elementary school classrooms. Participants: 88 fourth-grade students in 3 classrooms. Intervention: Condition 1: A lesson was given on the skill of listening to the teacher and rules for good listening. A poster on how to listen was put up in the classroom. The teachers demonstrated the "silent pose" (placing a finger on the lips) as a prompt intended to promote students’ quiet listening behavior, and praised the behavior of the students who were quiet. Although the teachers recorded the time until all students were quiet, they did not announce that information. Condition 2: In addition to the procedures of Condition 1, the teachers announced how much time had been taken for the students to become quiet. Condition 3: In addition to announcing the time taken, the teachers wrote the time on a graph, and continued to praise quiet behavior. Probe: The teachers praised the students after they had become quiet; however, no feedback was given to the students on time. Measure: The time taken after the teacher had instructed the students to be quiet for all students in the class to become quiet. Results: The time that the students took to become quiet decreased in Conditions 1 and 2; this change was maintained in Condition 3. Conclusion: The intervention appeared to have resulted in a reduction in the time taken to achieve quiet in these classrooms.