Mistaken Reinforcer

He devised a system called the reinforcement theory which divided the results into three areas. Some people, he claimed , reacted to positive reinforcers. Therefore, a child is rewarded with a treat, such as a sticker, a sweet or positive attention to encourage them to repeat new behaviour.

As an example of incentive, Levitt introduces a daycare study in which a daycare center fines $3 for parents who comes late. The study finds out that the number of parents coming late increased as they put a $3 of fine. He explains that the incentive of $3 was too small, and the fine made the parents to not feel the moral guilt for showing up late, resulting in more parents being late.

Specifically, how might a reinforcer assessment have been relevant to this? (pg. 8) The reason why the reinforcement procedure did work might have to do with the lack of preference assessment of reinforcer because if a preference assessment was conducted, the frequency of the response will increase. I also think that the reinforcement procedure didn’t work because the organism might be satiated to the reinforcer.

Margaret Heffernan once said, “For good ideas and true innovation, you need a mix of human interaction, conflict, argument, and debate.” In the article it is debated if there is any benefit in monetary rewards for students. Teachers, and parents alike are always trying to find the best way to reward and inspire there students to do well in school. Matthew G Springer is a professor of Public Policy and Education at Vanderbilt University. He is also the director of the National Center on Performance Incentives. He wrote this article to display his research and studies.

In special education classroom, positive reinforcement is applicable when students transit from activities through following instructions as provided and avoiding any form of distraction as well as maintaining a reasonable level of noise in whichever circumstance. Observation all these guarantee students a ticket. A minimum of 30 tickets a week guarantees them candy from their teacher. This is seen a motivation to the students hence they strive to receive the ticket.

This study, conducted as a requirement for an introductory psychology course, was an investigation of how learning principles such as reinforcement and punishment could be applied to improve conditions in everyday life. In particular, I was studying to see if positive reinforcement would help me to increase my daily water intake. Conceptually defined, daily water intake is the act of drinking water by mouth on a day-to-day basis, in order to keep body cells hydrated and functional. The positive reinforcement I used was a treat of bite-sized Hershey bars, a candy of chocolate. I had hypothesized that I would remember to drink water more often during the day if I rewarded myself for remembering during the intervention period.

There are numerous simple schedules that must be comprehended when performing the behavior of fulfilling an order for a guest as a Chick-fil-A employee. Once the guest has entered the store (discriminative stimulus, SD), the employee taking the order must signal to the guest (operant, R) that they are available and ready to take their order (variable interval, VI-5sec). The SD acts as an indicator that a reinforcer will quickly follow a response (Powel, Honey & Symbaluk, 2013, p. 234). Also, this variation of the chained schedule is on a VI-5sec schedule because on average, it will take the employee five seconds to signal the guest that they are available to take their order (Powel, Honey & Symbaluk, 2013, pp.

Paired-stimulus preference assessment. Separate paired-stimulus preference assessment (Fisher et al., 1992) will be conducted to identify preferred edible reinforcers for each participant. Between 12-16 stimuli were used for the assessment. Items were identified through parental reports and previous preference assessment conducted with behavioral teams. Before the assessment begins the participants will get to sample each piece of each type of food. Items will then be presented in pairs in which the therapist will tell them what both items are and then prompt them to “choose one”. Choice of an item will be defined as reaching towards or asking for an item. For edible reinforcers they will be allowed to consume the food chosen. If a participant

The Open University (2014) ‘Evaluative conditioning and food preferences’ [online], DE100 investigating psychology 1. https://learn2.open.ac.uk/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=442467&section=6.3. Accessed (27/04/15).

Participants will be assigned into four lab rooms with twenty students in each. First they will be primed randomly with either promotion or prevention focus, by writing a short essay describing how their personal standards had changed as they get matured, and they also need to complete the Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (Higgins et al., 2001) to check the success of the manipulation. Second, they will be given a difficult college-level math problem to solve and hand in within 20 minutes. Third, their answer sheets, which all have a failed feedback regardless of their actual performance, will be returned to them. Forth, they will be given a survey on rating of how enjoyable the math problem was, as well as indicate their choice for the next task to perform: a similar math problem or a different word or logic puzzle task which share the same difficulty. Finally, once the surveys are collected, the experiment is done. Participants are free to quit the task at anytime. If so, the quitted students will also be excluded from the analysis.

In a study done by Dianne M. Tice and Roy F Baumester (1997), procrastination was shown to cause a higher amount of stress for college students late in the semester, an overall increase in illness, and lower grades on assignments. Thus, procrastination on studying, or “cramming,” can be inferred to have a negative effect on both health and exam performance. The purpose of this experiment is to reduce cramming by increasing the time spent studying daily for my Psych 111 class through operational conditioning using M&M’s as a positive reinforcer. Studying is conceptually defined as the act of devoting time and attention to acquiring knowledge on a subject. Before the experiment was performed, the daily time spent studying for Psych 111 averaged 10-20 minutes. The positive reinforcer, M&M’s, are conceptually defined as button-shaped candies produced by Mars, Incorporated that contain a milk chocolate interior. Chocolate serves as an effective positive reinforcer as it stimulates the release of pleasure-causing endorphins (Dyer 2006). Because chocolate stimulates pleasure and arousal, I hypothesized that my study time will increase compared to my study time not using a positive reinforcement as I will be motivated to study more for the chocolate reward. The goal of this experiment is to increase study time to at least 30 minutes of studying per day on average while the subject is being positively reinforced.

They were able to control the curricula and everything about the entire learning experience along with conducting small scale complimentary experiments to better understand why the effects observed were happening. The hope was to determine which key skills children should acquire to prepare them for later success. The overarching theme in this experiment was that parents, teachers, and students from preschool to ninth grade were motivated to perform better when they were incentivized. Additionally, when students and teachers were provided with an incentive and threatened with the loss of the incentive, everyone preformed

The research method used for this study was a survey distributed as a self-report questionnaire. Data were collected by giving the questionnaire to 3,065 male and female adolescents attending grades 7 through 12 in three midwestern states. The sample design consisted of two parts. First, schools were chosen within a participating school district, which was representative for size and location within the area. Second, two or three classrooms per grade level were chosen among the general enrollment classes. A small subset was also added from applicants who volunteered from the districts who were interviewed a few weeks before the questionnaire was administered (Akers, Lanza-Kaduce, & Radiosevich, 1979).

A preference assessment is important for the individual is able to earn something of their choice when their tasks are complete. This experiment will consist of the individuals completing two separate tasks (making a snack and making the bed), alternated randomly, by utilizing the multiple opportunity method. With this method, if the participant skips a step, delays for a specified time or does a step incorrectly, the researcher completes the step for the participant allowing them the opportunity to complete the next step in the chain (Cooper, et al., 2007). The verbal instruction, “It’s time to_____” will be given to the individuals. If the individual did not complete the step or made an error, the paraprofessional would step in. If the individual did complete a step successfully, positive reinforcement was supplied to the

Nowadays, there is a growing tendency in the world that parents give cash to motivate children to get good grades. According to an article by Amanda Ripley, " Is Cash The Answer?", there is an interesting data about cash incentives. While some people such as psychologists think giving money can exacerbate children's capability, the result of an experiment by Roland Fryer showed that the effect of cash incentives was totally different for each child. Personally, I think cash incentives can only motivate somewhat educated children. Therefore, I would like to suggest my thought about the reason why giving cash did not work for some children in the experiment. First of all, most children were probably motivated at the first time in the experiment,