Archive for the 'Understanding' Category

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Getting negative reinforcement wrong

Published on 4 April 2009 in Increasing responding, News, Press, Teaching b mod and Understanding. 3 Comments

If it isn’t the most misunderstood concept in the analysis of behavior, “negative reinforcement” has got to be among the top two or three. (Suggest competitors in the comments!) People often misuse this term, employing it as a synonym for “punishment.”

For grins, I located a couple of examples illustrating this problem. They follow:

  1. In an article for the Daily Pennsylvania under the headline “Negative reinforcement aggravates excessive behavior in dogs, studies find,” Greg Rollman published these paragraphs:

    An owner’s instinctual response to a dog’s aggressive behavior might be to act aggressively toward the dog, but a new study shows that this could actually exacerbate that behavior.

    Meghan Herron, lead author and resident at the behavior clinic at the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Matthew J. Ryan Veterinary Hospital, surveyed 140 dog owners who sought treatment for their dogs at the clinic. She analyzed the owners’ disciplinary methods using different types of reinforcement – the owner’s positive, negative or neutral reaction to a dog’s behavior.

    Negative reinforcement, such as growling, yelling or hitting, tended to cause aggression in a high percentage of dogs. Positive reinforcement or neutral techniques, on the other hand, caused a negligible increase in dogs’ aggressive behavior.

    Mr. Rollman’s treatment is available here.

  2. In Men’s Fitness under the headline “Could you be insulted and belittled into getting fit? One outrageous Denver gym owner has built a thriving enterprise saying, ‘Yes, you can, chubby,’” Megan Michelson reported about the techniques employed by a fitness trainer:

    3. “It’s not my job to kiss your [hindquarters],” says Anti-Gym owner Michael Karolchyk. “If you want positive reinforcement, go to Richard Simmons or Oprah. Both of them are fat and make millions of dollars by making fat people feel good about themselves.”

    Karolchyk’s style of extreme negative reinforcement–complete with degrading insults, embarrassing nicknames and throwing toy fish at clients–has garnered both praise and criticism.

    Ms. Michelson’s report is available here. Be sure to read what the “experts say.”

For the record: Negative reinforcement occurs when a behavior results in the removal of a feature of the environment and that behavior increases (usually in frequency). There are lots of sources on the Internet that present it correctly.

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Songs revised

Published on 5 March 2009 in Classroom management, Teaching b mod and Understanding. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Sometime back, I posted an entry about songs that I used to make some basic rules of behavior modification memorable for students in my classes. This post reprises that post and updates it.

Please note that the songs associated with each “rule” are not meant to convey exactly the same sentiment as the rule; the songs’ messages are often more about individual relationships, so the lyrics do not conform precisely to the concepts behind the rules.

I’ve re-ordered some items and modified some of them. This is the version for this (the spring) semester of 2009.
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Progressive education and behavior modification

Published on 2 March 2009 in Classroom management, Need, News, Press and Understanding. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Over on Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL Larry Ferlazzo, a teacher of high school students who are learning English, reports that he adopted what sounds like a response-cost system for managing behavior and found it quite successful. Under the title “Have You Ever Taught A Class That Got ‘Out Of Control’?,” Mr. Ferlazzo explained that he awarded 50 points to sub-groups of students and then deducted points for misbehavior.

What’s interesting about that? Isn’t this a bit like the Good Behavior Game? Don’t lots of teachers use response-cost systems successfully? True. True.

One particularly interesting feature of the story, though, is Mr. Felazzo’s disarmingly honest assessment of his own views about employing such a system. Mr. Felazzo explains that, after several of his usual strategies proved ineffective, he found that he had to move beyond building relationships with students. That’s when he adopted the response-cost system.

Yes, I know some of you are thinking, as I initially thought, what is a progressive educator like me doing considering a classroom management system that sounds like behavior modification and operant conditioning? Why am I not continuing my focus on positive strategies to help students develop their own intrinsic motivation?

After Mr. Felazzo thinned the schedule of reinforcement (though he doesn’t report it that way), he discovered that the students were still behaving appropriately. He inferred that they developed intrinsic motivation. That’s possible. Alternatively, perhaps there is a behavioral trap operating in his situation: When they behaved appropriately, less-obvious reinforcers (e.g., success in class?) began to control the students’ behavior. For whatever reason they continued to display student-like behavior, and for that we should all be glad.

Thanks for the good example, Mr. Felazzo!

Link to Mr. Ferlazzo’s blog post.

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Saul Axelrod on management

Published on 17 February 2009 in Classroom management, Increasing responding, News, Research, Teaching b mod and Understanding. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Saul Axelrod, who has conducted lots of research about implementing and refining procedures for managing behavior in classrooms, presented a workshop on “Classroom Management Problems and Procedures for Solving Them” at the National Autism Conference in 2007. It’s available as free video.

This is good fundamental presentation. Download it. Watch it. Recommend it to others. Flash of the electrons to Regina at the PT site for reminding me of this. http://wpsu.org/ondemand/streams/Session_7108022.html

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Pennypacker on PT

Published on 2 February 2009 in Increasing responding, News, Press, Research, Teaching b mod and Understanding. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Over on Precision Teaching Rick Kubina has added another podcast to his published collection: It’s an interview with Hank Pennypacker (from 31 January 2009). Professor Pennypacker has been teaching about the appropriate analysis of behavior for many years, influencing many folks in positive ways. When you take the opportunity to jump over to Precision Teaching and look at the list of interviews, you may want to snag others, too.

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Freed kids and behavior mod

Published on 30 December 2008 in Extra-classroom matters, Other Sites, Press and Understanding. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

People, including B. F. Skinner, often talk about the philosophical proposition that operant principles reduce humans to animals whose behavior is determined by features of the environment, denying the be-loved construct of free will. For a variety of reasons (just one here: Read Dan Wegner’s excellent The Illusion of Conscious Will), I am pretty well convinced that those principles of stimulus control, reinforcement, punishment, shaping, and etc. explain great deal—even virtually all—of human behavior.

Mayhaps in another series of posts, I’ll write about the freedom-determinism question, but in this post I’m going into a simpler concern about freedom: Allowing children the freedom to do things on their own. If children are denied the opportunity to function in free-operant situations (i.e., those enviroinments where many different behaviors may occur and repeated), it will be very difficult for them to learn contingencies that exist in those environments.
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