Token Economies In Special Education

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.

At this young age, it is recommended that criterion specific rewards be used to motivate Doug and increase the frequency of positive behaviors in the classroom (Curran & the IRIS Center, 2003). Criterion specific rewards are incentives that are customized to individual students and based on what motivates them (Curran & the IRIS Center, 2003). Initially, it is necessary to identify what motivates the student and proceed to utilize that information to create

Token economies have a long history of being identified as evidence based practice (Simonsen, Fairbanks, Briesch, Myers, & Sugai, 2008). Through the use of positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, token economies function to manage student behaviors. Such economies are widely used in classrooms, especially in special education classrooms that tend to have students with more severe behavior problems.

Birnbrauer, Wolf, Kidder, and Tague (1965) performed an experiment using the token economy on a special education classroom with seventeen individuals. Each individual was given assignments to complete, but the assignments varied for each student. Some of the assignments were sight vocabulary, phonics, reading comprehension, cursive writing, addition, and time-telling. There were two ways that the students could earn tokens. If the student studied on their own and raised their hand when they had completed their work, the teacher would provide them with a token. If the teacher was required to be present for the work, a token reinforcer and a social reinforcer were rewarded when the task was completely correctly. If the students completed their work for the day, they were rewarded with a backup reinforcer. The researchers found that during the experiment, students paid more attention to their work and to the teacher and had less errors on their

This type of motivation is influenced heavily by rewards and external incentives. It also implies the notion that “I have to do something” in order to be compliant with what someone else wants me to do. It is a motivation that is primarily influenced by the hope of attaining tangible items such as prizes, special privileges, or money. Although Drive implies the heavy use of Motivation 2.0 by the corporate world, Pink also draws attention to the fact that schools typically operate under this mode, as well, and that it can have detrimental effects on our students and on learning, in general. Motivation 2.0 is also referred to in the book as the “Carrots and Sticks Approach”, and although it may yield positive results in the short-term, the repeated or incorrect use of extrinsic rewards can actually work against what educators are trying to achieve in terms of truly motivating their students.

According to Snowman & McCown, token economies are used to strengthen behavior. It is another type of behavior modification strategy that can be used with students to effectively promote good behavior within the classroom. Token economies are based upon a monetary system in which tokens are used to acquire desired reinforcers. A token is something that has little or no inherent value but that can be used to “purchase” items that do have inherent value (Snowman & McCown, 2012). Teachers will create a reinforcement menu which includes the items that can be “purchased” by tokens. Students will receive these tokens accordingly when they use the target behaviors appropriately. When students acquire a certain number of tokens for displaying good behavior, these can be exchanged for certain objects or activities in order to reinforce the

The learning disabilities can prevent the students from comprehending the course information, cause them to experience intense frustrations with the inability to quickly grasp concepts, and the students often struggle to perform at reasonable levels during testing assessments. The difficult challenge and overwhelming frustration can in turn impel many overaged special education students to quit and drop out of school. However, tutoring programs can relieve this problem. The school can provide experienced tutors and exceptional mentors to assist and encourage the struggling students. For instance, the tutors can concentrate on certain subjects or concepts that are challenging the students, spend sufficient time addressing and clarifying those issues, and utilize advanced resources to help the students most effectively understand and apply the information in the given courses. The tutors can also provide assistance to prepare the special education students for impending examinations (Allensworth and Easton, 2007). Thus, tutoring programs can help reduce the dropout rates by instilling the students with confidence, motivating them to continually improve, and by providing direct assistance that can help them understand difficult concepts and succeed in their

There was an experiment using marshmallows as rewards to kids to see how being patient influences their achievement. In the experiment, if the kids were able to wait for a longer while, they were rewarded with more marshmallows than they originally would have. The results show that if the kids are willing to delay gratitude, they will have better educational achievement.

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

I know that I positively impacted Pk-12 student learning because in my second grade classroom, I was able to motivate a student to stay on task and complete assignments through a behavior modification project. My objective for the behavioral change project was to implement a modification technique to prevent off-task behavior and increase motivation to complete all assignments by integrating the student’s personal preference for building. By adding a building component through the use of Lego’s, the student’s off-task behavior decreased, motivation increased, and he proficiently completed assignments within 20-25 minutes, instead of his previous time of 40-45 minutes.

Personally, I intend to utilize the token reinforcement system in my classroom because it utilizes an independent group contingency. This declares that although the same reinforcer is available for all the students in the class, but the attainment of the reinforcer depends on each student’s individual performance. This format allows the criterion for earning the reinforcer to either be the same for each student or adapted to be individually determined. All students who meet the criterion earn the/a reinforcer. Likewise, students who do not exhibit the targeted behavior(s) at the expected level do not earn the reinforcer. This format makes students responsible for personal behavior(s) and decisions.

The modern classroom has many challenges that face it. Shrinking budgets, less parental involvement, higher expectations, and growing class sizes, just to name a few. If this list was not daunting enough you also have the special needs students that have an array problems in your classroom that need specialized attention, lessons and seating. There are many forms of diverse learners from students who suffer from ADHD to physical disabilities to students with autism to ones that are bullied in school. There are so many things going on in our students lives we sometimes forget they have lives, pressures and disabilities that affect their performance and attitude in our class that have a profound impact on how they learn. For this paper I

Parents, students, and teachers all sometimes wonder how useful is homework? Though studies examining the relationship between homework and school achievement have been inclusive(ERIC). Still many teachers and researchers still agree that homework helps students achieve higher grades in school. Schools that assigned homework frequently showed higher student achievement than schools that assigned little homework(ERIC). This means that homework is working. Studies have generally found that if teachers carefully plan homework, homework can be quite helpful(KidSource). Homework has proven its effectiveness and is a very powerful factor in student performance.

Homework is the first involvement step these parents can take. Parents must first support learning at home. Involving themselves in their child’s homework gives parents the chance to understand the curriculum their child is being taught (Heffer). Home based involvement was found to have a significant and positive relationship with achievement (Hickman). Parents monitoring their child’s homework, or help editing reports, appear to have a direct impact on student’s attitudes, behavior, and learning. Homework is presented as a school requirement for successful child learning. Parents could create school-like structures to support homework success. Examples of this would be to establish schedules for time use (EBSCO-hw). Parents should try to find a way to fit homework into the flow of family life. Focus on homework effort, completion and accuracy is also very important. Parents could take specific approaches in reinforcing desired behavior such as praise, reference to family standards, and extrinsic rewards (EBSCO-hw). Parental involvement in homework appears to influence student outcomes because