Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Teaching: encouraging, discouraging, and maintaining behavior

The following information is from Unit 1 of the book Teaching: A Course in Psychology by Wesley C. Becker, Siegfried Engelmann, and Don R. Thomas. 

Note: Science Research Associates published the book in 1971. I am unsure if the publishers reprinted the book or if it is available to buy. I found it through a university inter-library loan program. I suspect that Becker or Engelmann use the book or some form of it in their special education teaching classes at the University of Oregon.
  • Teaching a new behavior to children
    • Three step process
      • Teacher presents a stimulus or task to the student
      • Student responds
      • Teacher reinforces response
    • Teacher does not reinforce response when:
      • The student does not respond
      • The student makes an unrelated response

  • Terms
    • Set: group of things or relationships that share properties
    • Stimulus: event in environment that influences behavior
      • Functional definition of a stimulus: provides the environmental event, the procedure, and the effect on behavior
        • For example, a functional definition for a student doing his homework everyday and then playing a video game would be: the environmental event playing a video occurred after homework completion and increased working on homework
          • The video game reinforces homework completion
        • Students vary by what is truly reinforcing or punishing
      • Procedural definition of a stimulus: provides the environmental event and effect on behavior
        • For example, a procedural definition for a student doing his homework and then playing a video game would be: the student will have access to a video game after he completes his homework
    • Concept instance: members in a stimulus set in a concept class (i.e. cats and dogs are members of the concept class pets)
    • Not-instance: members of another concept class that is NOT taught (i.e. cars and shoes are not members of the concept class pets)
    • Preceding stimuli: events in the environment that influence how a child responds
      • Task signals: signals related to the teaching objective, such as concept instances and not-instances
      • Prompting signals: signals that the teacher uses to get the correct response
        • The prompt is unrelated to the teaching and must be faded out
      • Others to be defined: attention signals, “do it” signals, and directions
    • Response or task response: how the students responds to receive reinforcement
    • Consequent stimuli: stimulus events that occur after responses
      • Reinforcing stimuli: strengthen responses
      • Punishing stimuli: weaken responses
      • Extinction: lack of reinforcement to response

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