THE ROLE OF SOCIAL AND MATERIAL REINFORCERS IN INCREASING TALKING OF A DISADVANTAGED PRESCHOOL CHILD 1

A 5-yr-old preschool boy with a low rate of interaction with his nursery school classmates was induced to pass out candy as a tactic to increase his rate of interaction with them.Interaction with classmates increased markedly during the periods he passed out choices of candy. These changes may have been due to increases in both his rate of initiating activities with his classmates and to increases in his classmates' rate of initiating activities with him. A total time of less than 1 hr was required of the teacher during the experiment.The problem behaviors of nursery school children studied by psychologists utilizing operant conditioning principles have been varied, and have included such target behaviors as crying and whining, excessive passivity, and isolate play. Of particular interest here are the studies concerning isolate behavior, defined as a low frequency of interaction with other children. Allen, Hart, Buell, Harris, and reported success in modifying the isolate behavior of a 4-yr-old nursery school child using teacher attention as the reinforcer. A similar study of a 3-yr-old isolate boy reported by Harris, Wolf, and Baer (1964) indicated that by changing the contingencies for adult attention, rapid changes in social behavior of the child resulted. Reynolds and Risley (1968) demonstrated that material as well as social reinforcers could be used to modify social behavior in the nursery. Buell, Stoddard, Harris, and Baer (1968) increased a nursery school child's rate of social contact with other children by increasing the child's use of outdoor play equipment through teacher reinforcement.The above studies relied heavily on the reinforcing effects of teacher attention. Reyn- 'The authors wish to express appreciation to Judy

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confidence: 99%

MODIFICATION OF PRESCHOOL ISOLATE BEHAVIOR: A CASE STUDY¹

Kirby

Toler

1970

“…Reynolds and Risley (1968) and Hart and Risley (1968) collected verbal samples by instructing observers to follow a child from one activity to another and write down in longhand "everything" the child said. Reliability checks taken periodically over the year yielded very acceptable product-moment correlation coefficients between observers in both cases.…”

Section: The University Of Tennesseementioning

confidence: 99%

A Method for Recording Verbal Behavior in Free‐play Settings

Nordquist¹

1971

The present study attempted to test the reliability of a new method of recording verbal behavior in a free-play preschool setting. Six children, three normal and three speech impaired, served as subjects. Videotaped records of verbal behavior were scored by two experimentally naive observers. The results suggest that the system provides a means of obtaining reliable records of both normal and impaired speech, even when the subjects exhibit nonverbal behaviors (such as hyperactivity) that interfere with direct observation techniques.Obtaining reliable records of verbal behavior in preschool free-play setting poses a number of problems that are exacerbated if the verbal behavior is sufficiently aberrant to present detection difficulties to an observer. Children with moderate to severe speech impediments very often produce verbal behaviors that are difficult to record simply because their speech is foreign to the untrained ear. Even trained professionals may disagree on the type of verbal event emitted unless given an opportunity to hear the event more than once. Unfortunately, live observation in free-play settings provides but one opportunity to record a single verbal event.Other conditions can cause recording problems in free-play settings. The noise level in an average sized preschool classroom is often very high, particularly during a free-play period. An observer simply cannot hear a child under these conditions unless he is very close to the child. Close observation is often not practical during a free-play period because the children spend much of their time moving rapidly about the room. For example, running, jumping, sliding, and climbing are common activities observed in preschool free-play settings. Thus The conditions discussed above may account for the fact that very few researchers have attempted to record verbal behaviors in free-play settings. Usually, a teacher-structured situation is selected where noise and movement are controlled. Sometimes the children are removed from the classroom altogether. Risley and Reynolds (1970), for example, observed their children in a special room (one at a time) where audio taped records were obtained and later transcribed. Risley and Hart (1968) instructed observers to record verbal behaviors during a snack period. The children were divided into small groups and sat with a teacher who spoke with them while they ate their food. This type of structure usually ensures that only one or two children will talk at a time. Thus, the observer's task is made considerably easier. It is interesting to note that the children in this study were also observed during a free-play period; but only non-verbal behaviors were recorded. This type of experimenter control over child activity is commonly observed in research dealing with verbal behavior.A small number of researchers have attempted to study verbal behavior in free-play settings. Reynolds and Risley (1968) and Hart and Risley (1968) collected verbal samples by instructing observers to follow a child from one activity to an...

“…Promptly, however, some researchers began examining the effect of another class of more-natural reinforcers-play activities and materials, and free time. These "natural" reinforcers were found in the home (Nordquist and Wahler, 1973;Phillips, 1968), in psychiatric institutions (Ayllon and Azrin, 1968;Mitchell and Stoffelmayr, 1973), and in educational settings for children and adolescents.6 It has been argued that natural reinforcers should be used whenever 6Betancourt and Zeiler, 1971;Brigham et al, 1972;Harris and Sherman, 1973;Hopkins et al, 1971;Jacobson et al, 1969;Knapczyk and Livingston, 1973;Miller and Schneider, 1970;Osborne, 1969;Reynolds and Risley, 1968;Salzberg et al, 1971;Wolf et al, 1968. possible because they should facilitate generalization of behavior change (Axelrod, 1971;Lovaas, Koegel, Simmons, and Long, 1973).…”

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confidence: 99%

Interactions Between Teacher Guidance and Contingent Access to Play in Developing Preacademic Skills of Deviant Preschool Children1

Rowbury

Baer

1976

Token-mediated access to play and snacks was made contingent on completion of academic tasks in the Baseline Experiment. This contingency produced stable completion rates that were subsequently doubled, and then tripled, for four deviant children in a special preschool. A reversal design demonstrated that the contingency was functional in maintaining the children's rates of task completion. The Guidance Experiment examined the role of a social event, teacher guidance, in the acquisition of task-completion skills, in a multiple-baseline-across-tasks design (with reversals). The analysis demonstrated that teacher guidance was an important supplement to the token-mediated contingency in establishing significant increases in task completions for a second group of three deviant children in the special class. The importance of teacher guidance was related to the difficulty level of the children's tasks.