Document Type

Thesis

Date of Degree Completion

Spring 2026

Degree Name

Education Specialist (Ed.S.)

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Richard Marsicano

Second Committee Member

Heath Marrs

Third Committee Member

Cristina Bistricean

Abstract

School-age children may experience barriers that impact their social-emotional functioning, including the development of prosocial behaviors. Responses to delays in prosocial skills have included the implementation of social stories and positive peer reporting (“tootling”) interventions, but knowledge of their effectiveness in larger classroom settings and for targeting sharing skills, respectively, is limited. Thus, the present study aimed to explore if a classwide social story and tootling intervention package had an impact on sharing, disruptive behaviors, and levels of activity engagement within a general education kindergarten classroom. Participants consisted of 11 kindergarten students from one classroom in a public elementary school in Washington state. Students were taught how to share using a classwide social story and were individually trained on how to report their classmates' sharing using the “tootling” intervention. Students were randomly assigned to participate in one of four activity stations daily. Instances of verbal sharing, behavioral sharing, activity engagement, and disruptive behavior were measured in the building activity station, during unstructured and structured play settings. A combined withdrawal and alternating treatments single-subject design was used to determine evidence of a treatment effect. Statistical analyses suggest that the treatment package was effective in increasing the frequency of prosocial sharing skills for Kindergarten students within both unstructured and structured play settings, but had a negligible impact on measures of activity engagement and disruptive behaviors.

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