Academic Remediation: Educational Applications of Research on Assignment Preference and Choice

Abstract

Within educational settings students can choose to engage in assigned academic activities or other, sometimes disruptive behaviors. In the current paper recent research on assignment preference, choice, and choosing is reviewed. Results of these studies show how educators can enhance students' academic behaviors (e.g., on-task behavior), decrease disruptive behaviors, and improve academic performance by (a) allowing students to choose assignments, (b) assigning higher preference academic activities, (c) strengthening reinforcement for engaging in academic activities, and (d) altering assignments to make them more acceptable to students.

Replicating and Extending Research on the Partial Assignment Completion Effect: Is Sunk Cost Related to Partial Assignment Completion Strength?

“…However, students’ skills will not improve unless they choose to work on assigned tasks (Skinner & McCleary, ; Skinner, Robinson, Johns, Logan, & Belfiore, ). This choice behavior may be influenced by several factors, including the amount of time and/or effort required to complete the assignment (Skinner, ; Skinner, Wallace, & Neddenriep, ). Because students may be more likely to choose to work on academic assignments when those assignments require less effort (Billington, Skinner, & Cruchon, ; Billington, Skinner, Hutchins, & Malone, ; Friman & Poling, ; Martin, Skinner, & Neddenriep, ), one way to enhance the probability of students choosing to engage in assigned work is to reduce assignment demands by making assignments shorter or replacing difficult high‐effort tasks with easier, known tasks.…”

Enhancing academic engagement: Providing opportunities for responding and influencing students to choose to respond

“…Within classroom environments, students make choices of a very different nature. If a student can do assigned academic work, academic engagement is a matter of choice (Skinner, Wallace, & Neddenriep, 2002). Choosing to engage in academic work is important because these behaviors aid in skill development and learning; however, this type of choice behavior differs from choosing not to engage in dangerous or harmful behaviors.…”

“…He has chosen to engage in the assigned work; however, at any given moment in time (continuous choice), John can cease reading and engage in another behavior (e.g., begin thinking about what he is going to have for lunch). While John's behavior may not have taken a large amount of time or cognitive resource (some might call it an unconscious choice), it is still choice behavior (Skinner, Wallace, & Neddenriep, 2002).…”

“…Rather, altering the classroom contingencies so that reinforcement for academic responding is superior to reinforcement for alternative competing responding should be sufficient to increase the probability of students choosing to respond to academic tasks (Martens & Houk, 1989;Martens et al, 1992;Myerson & Hale, 1984). This suggests that perfect extinction is not necessary because the probability of students choosing to engage in assigned academic tasks can be increased by enhancing reinforcement for academic responding (Skinner, Wallace, & Neddenriep, 2002).…”

Using Interdependent Group Contingencies with Randomly Selected Criteria and Paired Reading to Enhance Class-Wide Reading Performance

“…For example, skilled readers may require less time and effort to meet the criterion for earning reinforcement than less skilled readers (Skinner, Wallace, & Neddenriep, 2002;Stanovich, 1986). Basic and applied research on choice behavior suggests that both the additional effort and the thinner schedule of reinforcement (i.e., they meet the criterion less frequently and/or spend more time reading in order to meet the criterion), decreases the probability of less skilled readers choosing to engage in assigned reading behavior (Billington & Ditommaso, 2003;Billington, Skinner, Hutchins, & Malone, 2004;Neef, Mace, Shea, & Shade, 1992;Neef, Shade, & Miller, 1994).…”