0.1 Behavioral view of learning  (Page 7/10)

Elements can be either added to or removed from one's environment to influence behavior. Positive reinforcement refers to a situation in which a desirable element is added to the environment, resulting in increased frequency of the targeted behavior (e.g., giving a child a piece of candy after the child has exhibited desirable behavior). Negative reinforcement refers to a situation in which an undesirable element is removed from the environment, resulting in increased frequency of the targeted behavior (e.g., softening a blaring siren after a child presses the correct button).

Adding or removing environmental elements can also have the impact of decreasing the frequency of a targeted behavior. When this happens, the appropriate behavioral term is punishment. Positive punishment refers to a situation in which an undesirable element is added to the environment, resulting in decreased frequency of the targeted behavior (e.g., giving a child more work to do to decrease the frequency of mistreating peers). Negative punishment refers to a situation in which a desirable element is removed from the environment, resulting in decreased frequency of the targeted behavior (e.g., turning off music that a child likes in order to decrease the frequency of daydreaming during class).

Reinforcers can also be classified as primary or secondary. A primary reinforcer is one that fulfills the needs of basic physiological drives (e.g., hunger, thirst); all other reinforcers are classified in this scheme as secondary reinforcers .

Skinner and other behavioral psychologists experimented with using various reinforcers and operants. They also experimented with various patterns of reinforcement (or schedules of reinforcement ), as well as with various cues or signals to the animal about when reinforcement was available. It turned out that all of these factors—the operant, the reinforcement, the schedule, and the cues—affected how easily and thoroughly operant conditioning occurred. For example, reinforcement was more effective if it came immediately after the crucial operant behavior, rather than being delayed, and reinforcements that happened intermittently (only part of the time) caused learning to take longer, but also caused it to last longer.

The techniques described above can be utilized in such a way as to modify one's behavior to conform to a modified form of the behavior -- a process called shaping . Shaping simply means applying behavioral techniques to gradually adapt one's behavior, over time, into behaviors that successively more closely resemble the targeted behavior with each iteration of practicing the behavior. The growing resemblance of the modified behaviors to the targeted behavior is sometimes called successive approximations .

Operant conditioning and students’ learning: As with classical conditioning, it is important to ask whether operant conditioning also describes learning in human beings, and especially in students in classrooms. On this point the answer seems to be clearly “yes”. There are countless classroom examples of consequences affecting students’ behavior in ways that resemble operant conditioning, although the process certainly does not account for all forms of student learning (Alberto&Troutman, 2005). Consider the following examples. In most of them the operant behavior tends to become more frequent on repeated occasions: