This state of the art paper focuses on the skills and competencies needed by teachers working with severely handicapped children. Analyzed are the applications of behavior principles, systematic program building (task analysis), and instructional procedures to the acquisition of such basic skills as self-feeding and walking. Noted is the…

Proposed is a means of modifying soiling behavior of students (in grades K-3) in a regular classroom. Outlined are daily measurement, baseline, contingency, and teacher training procedures for the system involving verbal praise and activity time rewards. Also described are the evaluation design, special learning materials, and generalization and…

A 10-year-old boy with inappropriate social behavior was placed in a program of positive reinforcement and response cost. The boy earned plastic coins for good behavior and lost coins for inappropriate behavior. Rewards for given levels of earnings included extra recess time and field trips. Inappropriate behaviors decreased from a mean of 6.8…

A 21 minute sound color film was produced in an attempt to help teachers and educational specialists see people like themselves helping youngsters become more task oriented by the use of operant conditioning and modeling procedures formulated by Skinner (1953) and Bandura (1964). The unstructured and unrehearsed film consists of edited film…

This study used reinforcement principles to investigate some procedures for helping a 4-year-old Mexican-American girl establish peer contact in a Head Start class. Although Diane was healthy and intelligent, she had a low rate of attendance at school and spent most of her time there in isolation. The first procedure employed in the study was the…

This study was interested in determining whether (1) novelty produces greater or less attention than familiarity and incongruity, and (2) if children's labeling behavior was related to their attentive behavior. Using 3- to 5-year-old children, the results indicate that attention, at least for the stimuli presented, is an increasing function from…

The bibliography contains 27 abstracts and descriptive terms of documents dealing with behavior modification, diagnosis, and research into new developments. An author and subject index are included as are information for the user and cost information for the total volume or for individual documents. (JM)

A survey was conducted of 406 elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers to determine their understanding, acceptance, and use of the principle of operant conditioning. The treatment of data was by percent and chi square analysis primarily according to sex, experience, degree, and position. Subjects reported that a) they believed that the…

The present experiments investigated the effects of several classical conditioning manipulations on the performance of young children in an instrumental discrimination learning situation. Two predictions from general conditioning-extinction theory were tested: (1) acquisition of an instrumental response to a stimulus for a positive reinforcer in a…

Six children enrolled in a 'Kindergarten for Children with Special Needs' were the subject of a 3-month study of behavioral techniques applied to children's problem behavior through the training of parents. The children were rated as hyperactive and immature with various emotional, social, and physical problems. The study worked with the children…

Discussed briefly are techniques of behavior change used in behavioral programing for emotionally disturbed elementary school children with behavior problems. The author considers the child's ecology as a significant influence on the child's behavior, by which he means all the experiences and relationships that a child encounters in his…

Two studies were done to examine aggressive behavior in humans. In Experiment One, adults working on a plunger pulling task could receive a 3.5 ma shock at 75% probability every two minutes. The shock was unrelated to their plunger pulling behavior. Subjects could press a toggle switch to deliver electric shock to the experimenter, who was in the…

Described is a program to provide educational services for severely emotionally disturbed (autistic or childhood schizophrenic) children based on behavior modification principles. Both formal and informal tests of performance are given in the areas of preacademic and readiness tasks. Each child is individually tutored in language, pre-reading,…

An attempt is made to determine whether a behaviorally-oriented conditioning approach, "covert sensitization," is more effective in the treatment of alcoholism than the commonly used problem-solving approach, and whether female counselors employing covert sensitization were more successful than males. Thirty-two subjects selected on…

The thesis presented in this paper is that elementary counselors can become the most important behavioral change agents in the school. The following discussion will support this proposition. First, certain aspects of behavior modification will be discussed. Second, trends in elementary school counseling will be reviewed and finally, a synthesis…