Teachers of young children with moderate to significant support needs may have insufficient training to implement naturalistic instructional practices such as contingent responding. Naturalistic instructional practices are well researched, but limited studies exist on training teachers to use contingent responses to support children increasing…

The present study sought to evaluate the efficacy of an interdependent group contingency program on increasing homework completion and accuracy rates in fourth grade students in an elementary school. In addition, the present study attempted to determine whether randomized reinforcement was more effective than constant reinforcement. Overall, the…

Typical assessments of temporal discounting involve presenting choices between hypothetical monetary outcomes. Participants choose between smaller immediate rewards and larger delayed rewards to determine how the passage of time affects the subjective value of reinforcement. Few studies, however, have compared such discounting to actual…

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 exploratory study examined the ability of three stimulus preference assessments to identify effective reinforcers for general education students. Four students from Grades K through 5 and their teachers participated. A student nomination, teacher nomination, and ongoing (daily) stimulus preference assessment were evaluated. The results…

This study investigates the utility of material plus social reinforcement techniques for improving school attendance. (Author)

This study investigated the effectiveness of operant conditioning procedures in stimulating intermediate elementary students to constructively utilize free time for pursuing occupational information. (RC)

The study with two elementary students who had low levels of completion and accuracy on daily arithmetic assignments found that a negative consequence was not necessary and that use of a positive component alone was sufficient to maintain high levels of completion and accuracy. (Author/DB)

Two experiments analyzed the single-alternative form of the matching law as a description of student behavior. Four students (ages 8-10) exhibiting off-task behavior were exposed to variable-interval schedules of social reinforcement contingent on academic engagement. Results provided evidence that subject behavior was under control of the…

Data of several experiments described strongly suggest that generalized imitation as studied under successive-discrimination procedures is largely a function of the particular priming procedures used to generate the imitative behavior. (JH)

Assessed the effects of reinforcement on the test scores of middle- and low-income children labeled learning and behaviorally disordered. Each child was tested under conditions of no reinforcement, immediate tangible reinforcement, and immediate social reinforcement. Results indicated that test scores can be significantly increased by…

This study investigated the relative effectiveness of books on reading achievement scores when earned by under-achieving readers in a student tutoring program. Fifty-three fifth grade students who were in below grade level classroom reading groups and who scored from six months to three years below grade level on at least one of two reading…