Happy birthday, Fred Skinner! Here’s a post about the birthday of B. F. Skinner that I published in 2007 on my personal blog:
Born 20 March 1904 in Susquehanna, PA (US), B. F. Skinner made substantial contributions to our understanding of human behavior. Although his scientific contributions are substantial, I find his philosophical arguments for radical behaviorism even more important. I fear that his recommendations that people use scientific understanding of human behavior to overcome social ills such as war are dismissed too readily. He rejected coercion and punishment as the means of controlling human behavior and advocated humane use of reinforcement in their place.
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Over on Math Stories, Mr. K. has some comments about classroom discipline that are worth reading. Try this for example:
What the “good” teachers do
So, at this school at least, discipline is a huge part of being able to teach at all, much less well. Many of the teachers are successful. They have well run organized classrooms, their students are engaged and learning, and succeeding at it. In talking with one of them, we came to the realization that there are a lot of different styles, but they all have at least one thing in common:
The classroom is a culturally isolated from the rest of the school.
Teachers stand at the doors, and do a brain check on each kid as they come into the classroom. Every kid is given some sort of reminder that that door is a threshold, that when they cross it, the rules change, the expectations change, and their behavior better change. Those classrooms are little individual fortresses, and the successful teachers bring in the kids, but have set up barriers to keep the bad behavior out.
This reminds me of a study that I use sometimes in class. Allday and Pakurar (2007) examined the effects of having teachers greet students at the door. They found pretty clear increases in students’ attention to task during the class periods when the teachers complimented students as they entered the classroom.
Read Mr. K.’s full entry. Flash of the electrons to Liz Ditz full entry. Flash of the electrons to Liz Ditz for her post for alerting me to this. You can download a PDF the full version of the study by Allday and Pakurar for free.
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Under the headline, “Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel?” Jennifer Medina of the New York (NY) Times reported about an ambitious test of incentives for student performance. Here’s her lead (lede?):
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The project is one of several conducted by Roland G. Fryer, an economist who teaches and conducts research at Harvard University. It’ll be interesting to see how it evolves and what results.
Link to Ms. Medina’s story.
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