Behaviorists have offered a number of suggestions for using reinforcement effectively in class- rooms and therapeutic contexts:
◆ Specify desired behavior(s) up front. Behaviorists recommend that the desired end result, or
terminal behavior , be described at the very beginning in concrete, observable terms—ideally, with specification of both the form and the frequency of the behavior. For example, rather than talk about the need for students to “learn responsibility,” teachers might instead talk about the
importance of always following instructions, bringing needed books and supplies to class every day, and turning in all assignments by their due dates. By specifying terminal behaviors up front, teachers give both themselves and their students targets to shoot for, and they can better deter- mine whether they’re making progress toward those targets.
It’s often important to specify quality as well as quantity. For instance, rather than reinforc- ing students simply for sitting quietly at their desks, teachers should also reinforce them for working productively during that time. And rather than reinforcing students simply for the num- ber of books they read (which may encourage students to read many short, simple books), teach- ers should reinforce them for completing challenging reading material appropriate for their ability level (McCaslin & Good, 1996).
◆ Use extrinsic reinforcers only when desired behaviors aren’t already occurring on their own. It’s
neither possible nor necessary to reinforce every good deed. Learners of all ages often engage in
appropriate, productive behaviors of their own volition. Furthermore, many extrinsic reinforcers lose their effectiveness when used repeatedly (Michael, 2000; E. S. Murphy, McSweeney, Smith, & McComas, 2003).
◆ Identify consequences that are truly reinforcing for each learner. In school settings, social rein-
forcers (e.g., praise) or activity reinforcers (e.g., special privileges) are often quite effective. In some cases, immediate feedback that a student has done something correctly is all the reinforce- ment a student needs, especially when the quality of the performance isn’t otherwise clear (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; J. A. Kulik & Kulik, 1988; Shute, 2008).
One of the most common mistakes that teachers make in applying behaviorist principles is to assume that certain consequences will be reinforcing for all students. For example, a first-
grade teacher once consulted me about one of her students, a boy so disruptive that he was able to spend only a half day in the classroom. In an effort to modify the disruptive behavior, the teacher had attached to the boy’s desk a large sheet of heavy cardboard that was cut and painted to look like a clown, with a small red light bulb for a nose. When the boy exhibited appropriate classroom behaviors (e.g., sitting quietly or staying on task), the teacher would push a remote button that lit up the red nose. “I don’t understand why his behavior isn’t improving,” she told me. I suggested that perhaps the clown wasn’t reinforcing for him. “Nonsense!” the teacher replied. “The clown has always worked with other children!”
Not everyone will work for the same reinforcers. For example, although most students find their teacher’s praise reinforcing, some may feel uncomfortable when their individual efforts are publicly singled out as noteworthy; for such students, praise given in private or praise for the achievements of their group can be more powerful (Fuller, 2001; Jiang, 2010). And for some
students, only material reinforcers will do. In such a situation, having parents provide the rein- forcers at home for behaviors exhibited at school often works quite well (Kelley & Carper, 1988; D. L. Miller & Kelley, 1994).
How can teachers determine what events will be reinforcing for different students? One way is to ask the students’ parents, or even the students themselves. Yet children don’t always have a good sense of which consequences they will actually work for (Atance & Meltzoff, 2006; Northup, 2000), so in some instances a better approach is to observe students over a period of time to see which consequences really have an impact.
Teachers should keep in mind, too, that any single reinforcer won’t necessarily maintain its reinforcing value indefinitely, especially if used frequently (Bowman, Piazza, Fisher, Hagopian, & Kogan, 1997; Viken & McFall, 1994). For example, as much as you enjoy the praise of people
you respect, constant praise becomes tiresome after a while. It’s certainly possible to get too much of a good thing.
◆ Make sure that learners will gain more than they lose by changing their behavior. Consciously
or otherwise, children and adults alike sometimes engage in a cost–benefit analysis when consid- ering the consequences of different behaviors (Eccles & Wigfield, 1985; Feather, 1982; Friman & Poling, 1995; A. C. Perry & Fisher, 2001). Although they may have learned that a certain response will be reinforced, they’re unlikely to make that response if they have too much to lose or too little to gain by doing so. For example, people are more likely to recycle paper and aluminum cans if recycling containers are close at hand rather than located down the hall (Brothers, Krantz, & McClannahan, 1994; Ludwig, Gray, & Rowell, 1998). And consider the college student who estimates that she’ll have to study at least 20 hours a week to get an A in a history class. Even if the A is an effective reinforcer, it may not be worth the amount of time she’ll have to spend to earn it.
◆ Explicitly describe response–consequence contingencies. Reinforcement is typically more
effective when learners know exactly what consequences will follow various behaviors. For example, kindergartners are more likely to behave appropriately when they’re told, “The quietest group will be first in line for recess.” High school students are more likely to complete their Spanish assignments if they know that doing so will earn them a field trip to a local Cinco de Mayo festival.
One explicit way of communicating contingencies is through a contingency contract , an agreement that specifies certain expectations for the student (the terminal behavior) and the consequences of meeting those expectations (the reinforcer). To develop such a contract, the teacher meets with a student to discuss a problem behavior (e.g., talking to friends during inde- pendent seatwork or making rude comments to classmates). The teacher and the student then identify and agree on specific behaviors that the student will demonstrate (e.g., completing seat- work assignments within a certain time frame or speaking with classmates in a friendly, respect- ful manner). The two also agree on one or more reinforcers for those behaviors (e.g., a certain amount of free time or a particular number of points earned toward a desired privilege or prize).
The “reinforcer” must be reinforcing for the learner.
Together the teacher and the student write and sign a contract that describes the behaviors the student will perform and the reinforcers that will result. Contingency contracts have been shown to be effective for addressing a wide variety of academic and social behaviors (Brooke & Ruthren, 1984; D. L. Miller & Kelley, 1994; Rueger & Liberman, 1984; Welch, 1985).
◆ Administer reinforcement consistently. In group situations (e.g., in classrooms), it’s some-
times inconvenient to reinforce a behavior every time it occurs. But as you learned in Chapter 4 , continuous reinforcement brings about more rapid behavior change than intermittent reinforce- ment. If a student’s behavior has been particularly disruptive and time consuming, a little extra time devoted now to the continuous reinforcement of appropriate behaviors (inconvenient as it
may occasionally be) will probably save time over the long run.
◆ Gradually shape complex behaviors. In many situations, encouraging a desirable behavior
requires a process of gradually shaping the behavior. Each response should be well learned before reinforcement proceeds to a closer approximation. If an attempt at shaping moves too quickly, such that each response isn’t well established before a more sophisticated one is expected, reinforcement may not bring about any lasting behavior change.
To illustrate, let’s say that Ms. Garcia, a third-grade teacher, wants to reinforce an especially hyperactive boy for sitting quietly in his seat; her goal (the terminal behavior) is for him to sit quietly for 20-minute periods. On the first morning of the intervention program, the boy sits quietly for 1 minute, and so Ms. Garcia reinforces him. She probably doesn’t want to move on to
a 2-minute criterion after he has met the 1-minute criterion only once. Instead, she should con- tinue reinforcing him for 1-minute sits until the frequency of his sitting behavior makes it clear that she can begin to expect that behavior for a longer time.
◆ When giving reinforcement publicly, make sure all students have an opportunity to earn it. In
their attempts to improve the behavior of some students, teachers may unintentionally slight other, equally deserving students. Furthermore, some students may be unable to perform par- ticular behaviors through no fault of their own. As an example, consider the case of a young immigrant girl who had to adjust very quickly from a 10:00–5:00 school day in Vietnam to a 7:45–3:45 school day in the United States:
Every week on Friday after school, the teacher would give little presents to kids that were good during the week. And if you were tardy, you wouldn’t get a present. . . . I would never get one because I would always come to school late, and that hurt at first. I had a terrible time. I didn’t look forward to going to school. (Igoa, 1995, p. 95)
Ultimately, school should be a place where all students can, in one way or another, earn
reinforcement and in other ways be successful. Classrooms are busy places, however, and it may be all too easy to overlook a few students who desperately want and need a teacher’s attention. In such cases the teacher can explicitly teach children appropriate ways of seeking out and getting
reinforcement—for instance, by raising their hands or quietly approaching the teacher at an appropriate time, asking questions (e.g., “How am I doing?” “What do I do next?”), and keeping the teacher informed of their progress (“Look, I’m all finished!”) (Craft, Alberg, & Heward, 1998, p. 402; K. A. Meyer, 1999).
◆ Use objective criteria to monitor progress. Regardless of whether we define learning as a
mental change or a behavioral one, we know that learning has occurred only when we can see an actual change in behavior. Behaviorists urge us to assess that change in concrete, objective terms—in particular, by assessing the frequency of a desired behavior both before and during
any systematic use of reinforcement. The frequency of a behavior before reinforcement begins is its baseline level. Some behaviors occur frequently even when they aren’t explicitly being rein- forced, whereas other behaviors occur rarely or not at all. Only by comparing the baseline fre- quency of a response with its frequency after reinforcement begins can teachers and other practitioners determine whether their use of reinforcement is actually yielding results.
◆ Foster the ability to delay gratification. In the preceding chapter, I stressed the importance
of immediate reinforcement in operant conditioning, especially for young children and animals.
Ultimately, however, success both in school and in the outside world requires people to delay
gratification —that is, to forgo immediate pleasures in order to earn more satisfying conse- quences over the long run. In general, the ability to delay gratification improves with age, in part as a result of maturational changes in the brain (Green, Fry, & Myerson, 1994; M. I. Posner & Rothbart, 2007; Steinberg et al., 2009).
When immediate reinforcement isn’t possible, it’s often helpful to tell children that reinforce- ment will come later (S. A. Fowler & Baer, 1981). For example, a teacher who wants to reinforce students’ persistence through a difficult lesson might say, “Because we’re working so hard this morning, after lunch we’ll rehearse the class skit you’ve all been enjoying so much.” Also, children can more successfully delay gratification when the waiting period is increased gradually and when they learn strategies for coping with the wait—for instance, by engaging in an activity in the interim or by telling themselves “If I wait a little longer, I’ll get a bigger reward” (Binder, Dixon, & Ghezzi, 2000; M. R. Dixon & Cummings, 2001; M. R. Dixon, Rehfeldt, & Randich, 2003).
◆ Once the terminal behavior is occurring regularly, gradually wean learners off extrinsic reinforcers.
When a previously learned response is no longer reinforced at all, it may quickly disappear. From
a behaviorist perspective, either of two conditions can prevent such extinction. In some cases, improvements in behavior begin to lead to intrinsic reinforcement—to internal feelings of accomplishment, pride, and so on—and so continue of their own accord. But not all important behaviors are, in and of themselves, intrinsically satisfying. When a desired behavior involves a tedious but necessary activity—for instance, practicing basic math facts or cleaning up after messy art projects—an intermittent reinforcement schedule can help to maintain it indefinitely.
Strategies for Decreasing Undesirable Behaviors
In this and the preceding chapter, we’ve talked at length about how new responses can be learned, modified, and maintained through the use of reinforcement. But sometimes the goal may be to decrease —and ideally eliminate—a behavior. Four possible methods of reducing and
eliminating misbehavior are extinction, noncontingent reinforcement, reinforcement of other behaviors, and punishment.
Extinguishing Responses
During a lengthy hospitalization, a child named Jimmy acquired an alarming habit of banging his head on the side of his crib. Whenever nurses heard him doing so, they rushed to his room and restrained him, inadvertently reinforcing and maintaining his head-banging behavior with their attention. A consulting psychologist successfully eliminated the head banging through a process of extinction: A protective helmet was strapped on Jimmy’s head to prevent injury, and the nurses were instructed to ignore Jimmy during head-banging episodes. At the same time, because Jimmy clearly craved attention, the nurses did spend time with him on other occasions.
Extinction—making sure that a particular response no longer leads to reinforcement—is sometimes an effective means of eliminating inappropriate behavior in the classroom. For instance, students who engage in disruptive classroom behavior may stop if such behavior no longer yields the attention they seek. And cheating on classroom assignments may soon dis- appear if students never receive credit for the scores they obtain on those assignments. We don’t necessarily want to eliminate the particular reinforcers that have been operating in such circum- stances (e.g., attention, class credit); we simply need to make sure that those reinforcers aren’t
contingent on inappropriate responses.
Unfortunately, extinction isn’t a completely dependable method of eliminating unwanted behavior, for several reasons. First, it isn’t always possible to identify the specific consequence actually reinforcing a response; for example, although some children engage in head-banging behavior to gain attention (as Jimmy did), others do so to escape from unpleasant tasks (a form of negative reinforcement) or provide self-stimulation (Iwata, Pace, Cowdery, & Miltenberger, 1994). Second, several reinforcers may be maintaining a response, including some that are hard to remove; for example, although a teacher may be able to ignore the jokes of a disruptive class clown, classmates may continue to laugh at the jokes (Landrum & Kauffman, 2006). Third, even if all sources of reinforcement can be removed, the behavior may show an extinction burst, increasing in frequency before it begins to decline (see Chapter 4 ). Fourth, extinguished behav- iors sometimes show spontaneous recovery, popping up again at a later date, perhaps in a differ- ent context (Alberto & Troutman, 2009; B. F. Skinner, 1953). Finally, some responses may be particularly resistant to extinction because they’ve previously been reinforced on an intermittent schedule (Pipkin & Vollmer, 2009). When responses can’t be extinguished for any of these rea- sons, other approaches are usually necessary.
Presenting Noncontingent Reinforcement
In recent years, some researchers have found that presenting desired consequences noncontingently—for instance, giving attention at unpredictable times or providing regular breaks from difficult tasks—can lead to a decrease in inappropriate behavior ( J. L. Austin & Soeda, 2008; Ecott & Critchfield, 2004; Waller & Higbee, 2010). In this way, children gain the consequences they seek without having to act out. The primary disadvantage of this approach, of course, is that children don’t necessarily learn more appropriate behaviors to replace the coun- terproductive ones. Occasionally, too, it might lead to superstitious behavior (see Chapter 4 ).
Reinforcing Other Behaviors
Rather than using noncontingent reinforcement, a teacher or therapist might identify specific behaviors that will be reinforced while also making sure that the behavior to be eliminated isn’t
reinforced. Sometimes a learner is reinforced for making any response other than a particular
(presumably undesirable) response during a certain time period; in this situation, the learner must never make that particular response at all. 1 As an example, consider the teacher who says,
“I’m going to write down the name of every student who speaks out of turn today. If your name isn’t on the board by 3 o’clock, you can have a half hour of free time.” A drawback with this approach is that students can potentially earn the reinforcer if they exhibit other inappropriate behaviors during that time period.
A better strategy is to reinforce only desirable alternatives to an undesirable behavior (e.g., Lerman, Kelley, Vorndran, Kuhn, & LaRue, 2002; Vladescu & Kodak, 2010; Vollmer, Roane, Ringdahl, & Marcus, 1999). 2 Ideally the other behaviors are incompatible with the behavior to be
eliminated. (Recall our use of incompatible behaviors in counterconditioning and breaking hab- its in Chapter 3 .) The first step is to identify a response that’s incompatible with the response to be eliminated—a response that can’t be performed at the same time as the undesirable response. That incompatible behavior is then reinforced whenever it occurs. For example, a child’s inap- propriate out-of-seat behavior might be reduced by reinforcing the child whenever she is sitting down. A tennis player who displays inappropriate emotional outbursts every time he misses a shot can be reinforced for keeping his frustration under control by standing still, taking several deep breaths, and then continuing to play (Allen, 1998). A chronic litterbug might be put in charge of his school’s antilitter campaign and given considerable recognition and praise for his efforts (Krumboltz & Krumboltz, 1972). Reinforcing other (possibly incompatible) behaviors is often more effective than extinction, provided that teachers or therapists are consistent in their reinforcement of desired behaviors and non reinforcement of inappropriate ones (Pipkin, Vollmer, &
Sloman, 2010; Woods & Miltenberger, 1995; Zirpoli & Melloy, 2001).
Using Punishment
The use of punishment as a means of behavior control is widespread in both child-rearing and educational practice (Landrum & Kauffman, 2006; Straus, 2000a, 2000b). One likely reason for the prevalence of punishment as a disciplinary measure is that, because it tends to decrease or eliminate an undesirable behavior fairly quickly, the punisher is negatively reinforced: By using
punishment, he or she gets rid of an unwanted state of affairs, at least temporarily.
Punishment is often used when methods such as extinction or reinforcement of incompati- ble behaviors are unproductive or impractical; furthermore, punishment is sometimes more effective than other behaviorist techniques (Conyers et al., 2004; Frankel & Simmons, 1985; Lerman & Vorndran, 2002; Pfiffner & O’Leary, 1987). Punishment is especially advised when a behavior might harm either oneself or others; in such cases, using punishment to eliminate this behavior rapidly may actually be the most humane course of action.
Psychologists and educators have offered numerous suggestions for using punishment effec- tively, many of which decrease the chances of negative side effects. The guidelines that follow are among those most commonly cited:
◆ Choose a “punishment” that is truly punishing without being overly severe. Punishment, like
reinforcement, is defined by its effect on behavior: True punishment decreases the response it follows, and typically it does so quite rapidly. (For example, return to Figure 4.5 in Chapter 4