The effect of adult social reinforcement on the cooperative play of a five-year old girl in a preschool setting was assessed under two conditions: (1) presented randomly throughout the school day, and (2) presented contingent on cooperative play. Only in the latter condition was a significant change in cooperative play observed.
A 3-yr-old preschool girl with deficits in both motor and social repertoires was socially reinforced by teachers for use of outdoor play equipment, as a contribution to her motor skills and as a tactic to produce increased social contact with other children. Her use of outdoor play equipment, and various examples of her social interaction with both teachers and children were scored in the course of experimental development and analysis of her rate of equipment use. Equipment use increased greatly under the social reinforcement contingency; certain desirable examples of social interaction with other children showed a collateral development; other examples of adult-oriented development remained constant; and one class of undesirable baby-like behavior decreased markedly. Thus, the study provided a picture of what other behavior changes may take place in the course of behavior modification aimed at a single response class.That the preschool teacher should be a no- Reynolds, 1967;Baer and Wolf, 1968;Hart, Reynolds, Baer, Brawley, and Harris, 1968). These demonstrations uniformly single out a specific class of behavior (a behavior problem for the child studied) and demonstrate that remediation can be produced experimentally. The changes produced are clearly desirable in such cases, and are rarely questioned. However, a persistent question has concerned the possibility of allied behavioral changes in the course of the study.
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