Token Economy: Teacher's Use of Positive Reinforcement in Schools

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.

Positive reinforcement is utilized in the classroom by a teacher to strengthen a desired behavior and to increase its likelyhood to occur again. An example, would be giving out a candy bar everytime a student sits in their corresponding seat. A second example, of positive reinforcement in a classroom would be praising a student with a “good job” or “excellent” stamp after a student gets the correct answer to a problem. Positive reinforcement can not only strengthen good behavior amongst students but also cause extinction of dispruptive behaviors. Students will notice the postive behaviors reinforced by rewards while negative behaviors

Following the introduction of the whole school behaviour policy, it was also made compulsory for schools to include a system of rewards and sanctions (Elton, 1989, Steer, 2005; DFE, 2014; Payne, 2015). Within school X it was found that this system was based on the behaviourist principles of Skinners (1974) theory. The use of rewards and sanctions in school X consisted of positively reinforcing desirable behaviours and correcting negative behaviour through sanctions. The behavioural theory underlines that by reinforcing a particular behaviour, children will repeat it as they begin to associate rewards with a particular behaviour (Skinner, 1974; Morgan, 2009; Rogers, 2011a). For example it was observed that when a child was positively praised for helping others, the teacher would reward the child by awarding a dojo. A dojo is used as a form of praise which amounts to a score at the end of the week based on how many dojos a child receives. This will then feed on to the merit card and sticker system enabling children to be rewarded by prizes. Consequently children were able to make associations between the desired behaviour and its outcome. This is therefore identified as a form of extrinsic motivation (Roffey and O’ Reirdan, 2001; Payne, 2015).

Reinforcement that occurs directly because of the students actions. No one else is needed to get the reinforcement.

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

Education today is too Type X- meaning the emphasis on greater rewards for doing what you should do anyways is based on extrinsic rewards. The education system seems to be heavily based on carrots and sticks. The biggest way to motivate someone seems to be by dangling something, such as a carrot, in front of someone 's face or poking them with a stick. If you want a student to do something, why are they motivated with some type of compensation such as an A in the class? In his book, Drive, Daniel H. Pink divides motivation into three categories that evolved over time- Motivation 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. using these theories to challenge this motivation of carrot and sticks.

Only this time, there will be a reward and punishment system in the form of a token economy that should influence my behavior. During the conditioning trials period, (Monday, March 27th through Friday, April 14th weekdays only), I will follow the exact same procedures that I did the previous week. I will wake up at exactly 6:00 am when my alarm goes off, get out of bed, and note the date, time, and whether or not I accomplished the task successfully. However, this time the number of times and star stickers that indicate I successfully accomplish this task will matter more. If I successfully wake up at 6:00 am during each weekday session (five days in a row), I will reward myself by going to see a movie on the weekend. If I wake up on time only 4 out of the five weekday sessions, then I will reward myself with watching one movie on Netflix during the weekend. Going to the movies and watching a movie on Netflix will be positive reinforcement. If I fail to wake up on time for three days in a row during a specific conditioning week, then I will not watch any movie at all. Furthermore, I will not allow myself to access Netflix. This will be a negative punishment. Ultimately, the desired behavior of waking up at 6:00 am weekday mornings will be positively reinforced by the reward of getting to watch a movie on the weekend. Failure to wake up at 6:00 am for three or more weekdays will be negatively

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.

Content area F, Behavior-Change Systems, includes the task list item F-02: Use token economies and other conditioned reinforcement systems (Behavior Analyst Certification Board, 2014). My submission for this content area is the token economy assignment from SPE 565, which demonstrates the implementation of a token economy system. A token economy system uses items which are placed or attached to a board to positively reinforce desired behaviors. While the items used may have little to no value, they can be saved and used to gain access to a more desired item or activity. The intervention works by conducting a preference assessment to identify the items with the strongest reinforcement value. These items can be used as the rewards, or back-up

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

The Classroom Management Plan (CMP) reflects Quality Indicator 5 (QI 5) because it has good examples of how to motivate, engage, have positive-social interactions with, and self-motivate the students in my classroom. I will motivate the students in my classroom with extrinsic rewards that the students will have to earn. In my classroom, I will have Dojo points and a treasure box full of rewards. I will also have extra recess and GO NOODLE dance parties as entire class rewards. Theorist, Fred Jones says that extrinsic rewards for students in the classroom helps with having positive behavior and minimizing behavior problems. I will also create a learning environment that engages the students by finding out the interest of each student. I will

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

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