Six experiments were conducted with graduate students to assess resurgence of compound (i.e., multi-step) academic responding under free operant procedures. Participants learned two different interobserver agreement (IOA) methods -- compound behaviors -- through instructional phases before beginning the experimental phases. Each experiment…

Preschool and kindergarten teachers expect children to sit appropriately and attend to the teacher during group instruction. However, children may engage in high rates of inappropriate responses that distract other students from learning opportunities. In addition, children often receive intermittent teacher attention for inappropriate responses,…

Students may avoid working on difficult tasks because it takes them longer to complete those tasks, which results in a delay to reinforcement. Research studies show that reinforcer and response dimensions can be manipulated within a concurrent operants framework to bias choice allocation toward more difficult tasks. The current study extends…

The current study examined the reinforcing effects of choosing among alternatives in a four-part evaluation. In the first study, initial-link responses in a concurrent-chains arrangement resulted in access to terminal links in which the completion of an academic task resulted in (a) the choice of a reinforcer (choice), (b) the delivery of an…

Discusses the interaction, beyond the normal instructional scope, of elementary school students and their teachers with the emphasis on sex role behavior, reward seeking, and the differences in learning problems of boys and girls. (RK)

The purpose of this study is to assess the utility of applying reinforcement theory to the observational study of pupil-initiated verbalizations within the classroom. (Author)

Two students (ages 10-11) with learning disabilities exhibited improved on-task behavior and academic performance during self-monitoring procedures, with additional increases resulting from self-graphing procedures. However, little improvement in on-task behavior and academic productivity was noted with the introduction of self-reinforcement and…

To manage classrooms successfully, teachers must monitor carefully the relationships between their own actions and those actions' intended and unintended results, since erroneous perceptions of these relationships can cause problems. Teachers can act inappropriately when their goals are mistaken, as for instance when they develop false…