Background: Peer mentoring can be a powerful complement to health instruction. Mentoring has been used to change health behaviors and promote sustainable lifestyle patterns in adults and, more recently, among adolescents. Purpose: This article reviews the use of peer mentoring to promote health practices and describes how this approach can be used…

A partial replication of an investigation of the effect of covert reinforcement on a perceptual estimation task is described. The study was extended to include an extinction phase. There were five treatment groups: covert reinforcement, neutral scene reinforcement, noncontingent covert reinforcement, and two control groups. Each subject estimated…

The study investigated the effectiveness of group assertive training with nonassertive college students. Significant differences were found between experimental and control subjects on the College Self-Expression Scale, the Subjective Unit of Disturbance Scale, eye contact, length of scene, and assertive content but not on response latency.…

In two studies undergraduates with low self-esteem followed reinforcement paradigms. Found overt events to be preferable as reinforcers, although no differences existed between reinforcement groups and both did better than controls. Also found desirable behaviors that occurred infrequently, and very frequent but neutral behaviors, to be the most…

The results in this experiment identified both partial and continuous reinforcement as efficacious procedures for reversing learned helplessness in college students. The partial success therapy schedule produced greater response persistence in escape extinction following therapy. The framework for a new therapy technique, persistence training, is…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of positive and negative reinforcements upon black college students. In the first experiment subjects received either positive or negative reinforcement from a black or a white evaluator. Results indicated that behavioral change (compliance) was greater in response to negative reinforcement…

This paper reviews earlier experiments in fostering creative expression in the writing of students at all educational levels, and presents an abstract of an experiment involving 81 students of educational psychology at Tennessee State University. Each wrote one essay per week, which was then rated for creativity on four scales (fluency,…

Research investigating the performance of students enrolled in courses taught by a Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) has tended to support the claim that PSI is a superior teaching method. The present research study isolated the self-pacing aspect of PSI courses and attempted to teach 13 academically deficient first year college students…