Students speaking out of turn, texting, telling rude jokes, falling asleep in class, making distracting gestures — managing these behaviors is all in a day’s work for many middle school teachers, who ...

Further, teachers often expect that by middle school, kids are old enough to behave without being coddled. As a result, positive reinforcement techniques widely used in elementary school are often ...

In a recent study in Nature Communications, researchers increased synaptic serotonin through a selective serotonin-releasing agent (SSRA), fenfluramine, to investigate its impact on human behavior.

The study found that when middle school teachers praised students at least as often as they reprimanded them, class-wide on-task behavior improved by 60–70%. Students speaking out of turn, texting, ...