Student performance in a self-paced personalized system of instruction course is varied in rates and patterns of work. Using 118 students in a college level introductory psychology course the investigators found 1) students worked at a variety of rates and patterns; 2) students who started to work early had a much greater chance of finishing the…

Provides a general overview of factors affecting foreign language learning, and discusses how they are related to one another. (EKN)

The usefulness of individual reinforcement schedules in maximizing the attending to task and math percentage correct of 12 behavior disordered/learning disabled (BD/LD) adolescents is examined. Results indicate that individual reinforcement schedules are important to the academic success of some adolescent BD/LD students. (Author)

The performance of five students (ages 6 to 10) in an adjustment class for deaf children was compared under fixed and variable ratio schedules of reinforcement. During the VR condition, students visually attended more and engaged in disruptive behavior less often than during the FR condition. (Author)

The role of reinforcement has long been an issue in learning theory. The effects of reinforcement in learning were investigated under circumstances which made the information necessary for correct performance equally available to reinforced and nonreinforced subjects. Fourth graders (N=36) were given a pre-test of 20 items from the Peabody Picture…

The study investigated the effects of interspersing known items during spelling instruction on new words for three moderately to severely mentally retarded male students (ages 19 to 24). Results showed that high density reinforcement did facilitate performance over baseline; however, interspersal training was superior to the other conditions in…

The effects of amount of exposure to response/outcome independence and teacher expressiveness on student ratings of the instructor, achievement test performance, and attribution items were studied. University students completed an aptitude test that provided contingent or noncontingent feedback and varied in length (short, medium, or long). All…

Five experiments were conducted to determine whether properties inherent in some training procedures may subtly influence the adaptability of skilled performance of complex tasks. The first two experiments assessed the insensitivity of low-rate performances. Examined in the third experiment was the issue of whether instructions that focus…