Cited are two studies which analyzed the reinforcing effectiveness of verbal evaluative comments on educable retarded and handicapped elementary school children. In the first study, a two-choice push button discrimination, it is reported that Ss consistently chose a button which avoided the verbal comment "wrong", but made no significant…

Experimental and ethological studies were undertaken to clarify the role of positive and negative evaluations in the control of the child's performance on laboratory and classroom learning tasks. The results indicate that "social reinforcers" are effective to the extent that they communicate to the child unambiguous information on the adequacy of…