The high-school problem is nothing new. In one of his early writings, James S. Coleman, the brilliant sociologist who later wrote the famous report on the equality of opportunity for education (the "Coleman Report") and the first study of public and private schools, identified the essential high-school problem: "our adolescents today are cut off,…

The goal of the investigation was to eliminate the disruptive, resistant and assaultive behaviors and increase the appropriate peer interaction of an economically disadvantaged kindergarten white boy. The treatment program involved presentation of adult (teacher) attention contingent upon desirable classroom behavior, withholding of attention…

The present study evaluates the immediate effects of an experimentally manipulated social comparison on the subsequent behavior of lower socioeconomic status black children four to five and seven to eight years of age. The effects of four conditions of social comparison are measured with respect to the children's self-reinforcement,…

Recognizing that punishment for aggression often is noneffective or inadvertently reinforces the aggressive act, the authors discuss an alternative approach and provide an explanation of the exchange theory of aggression. Three classroom experiments, operated with children chosen as the most severe behavior problems in a local school system, are…

A description of the Social Exchange Laboratory's work with autistic children is presented. The laboratory's philosophy of the exchange theory of autism, seen as a set of habitual response patterns maintained and intensified by exchanges which are inadvertantly structured by others in the child's environment, is set forth with characteristics,…

This thirteenth in a series of twenty-nine learning modules on instructional execution is designed to give secondary and postsecondary vocational teachers help in understanding the various types and uses of reinforcement techniques and in acquiring skills needed to apply these techniques in their teaching. The terminal objective for the module is…