The educational system today often relies on incentives in order to motivate students. However, it might also encourage students to engage in deceptive behaviour (e.g. malingering) in order to reach certain benefits. Hereby, we investigated whether students would intentionally fabricate symptoms (i.e. malinger) when confronted with a…

The major purpose of the study was to compare the frequency and effectiveness of positive and negative reinforcement practices deployed by teachers in boys' and girls' secondary schools in urban and rural areas. It was hypothesized that there would be no difference in use of reward and punishment by teachers in secondary schools in urban and rural…

Arguments for and against corporal punishment are set against a backdrop of overriding public concern about school discipline. In every year since 1969, the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll has ranked lack of discipline as one of the top two problems in public schools. This report furnishes a historical perspective for corporal punishment, explains…

A point system was introduced at an elementary school in British Columbia whereby: (1) students lost points for their entire class when they misbehaved; and (2) point totals were openly posted daily and weekly. The method proved effective in improving the behavior of the whole school population. (Authors/PP)

This paper represents a report of a year-long case study of the implementation of a token economy in an entire elementary school. The effort was intended to provide teachers with an alternative to corporal punishment as a form of school discipline. In this report, both the successful and unsuccessful procedures are described in chronological…

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…