Teacher A: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we didn’t have to use any aversive procedures. Punishment is such a drag.
Teacher B: Yes! I agree. Positive reinforcement is sooo powerful—shaping, schedules, maintenance, and all that. You can do just about everything with it.
Teacher A: Really. I mean, we should make our classes totally positive this year. No negatives. None!
As strongly as I advocate the use of positive strategies in classroom management (“Catch ‘em being good!”), I have to acknowlege that there are at least three reasons it is impossible to create behavior management systems that exclusively employ positive reinforcement. Here’s why reasonable folks should resist the superficial appeal of the all-positive or positives-only Chimera.
Continue reading ‘Why not only positives?’
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Under the title “Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School?” Amanda Ripley of Time Magazine reported about the outcomes of the large-scale study led by Roland Fryer Jr. that tested whether incentive systems affected students’ achievement. Professor Fryer, who collaborated with many others on this ambitious project (> 270 schools), found that rewards for outcomes (e.g., grades and test scores) were less effective than rewards for what he calls “educational production functions” (activities, such as reading and participating, that led to better learning).
Here is how Ms. Ripley characterizes the outcomes:
Continue reading ‘Fryer’s incentives study’
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In “Like a Rat: Animal research and your child’s behavior” that they penned for Slate, Alan Kazdin and Carlo Rotella explain why it is sensible to infer methods for modifying human behavior from research on rats, pigeons, and monkeys. They quite clearly show how what we know from systematic research on infra-human organisms applies to us, the magnificently complicated, subtle, and rational organisms—at least as we seem to see ourselves.
Psychologists who work with children and families tend to avoid mentioning to parents that the treatments they use are often based on research done on animals. It’s no secret that the widely used technique of the timeout was developed in studies on rats or that important early research leading to treatments for anxiety in humans was done on dogs, cats, and other species—but the subject doesn’t come up a lot in conversation. We will confess to doing our bit to perpetuate this professional shyness about animal research by tiptoeing around it….
If you, dear reader, have ever wondered why research about pressing levers or pecking disks matters for changing human behavior or have had someone ask you a question about the connection between research conducted in a laboratory with animals and learner performance, you should read Professors Kazdin’s and Rotella’s “Like a Rat: Animal research and your child’s behavior.”
By the by, it’s just one of many excellent pieces that they’ve published on Slate.
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Over on The Adventures of Miss Behavior, Enedelia Sanner has a post about getting data on her children’s behavior before introducing interventions. As I suspect is true for most folks, she doesn’t always gather baseline data, even though she’s an informed behavior analyst. In the post she makes some good points about the value of data in informing practice, but there’s another feature of the post to which I want to point.
Continue reading ‘Positive-negative ratios’
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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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Over on Snail-Snail, snail_snail has a couple of posts that illustrate fundamentals for behavior management. The recommendations, in the form of a list one should ask oneself, provide the basic background that should be in place before one attempts to employ more formal behavior modification procedures.
Under the titles “Onaway Elementary/Day N,” snail_snail raises questions such as “Are the teacher’s directions usually clear?” and “Is the teacher consistent? Are the rules in force for all students? every day?” Most of the items on the list of questions should serve as reminders about basic teaching practices.
Continue reading ‘Baseline practices’
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