The Problem
Theodore is a fourteen-year-old eighth grader. He is a popular student with athletic abilities in football and basketball. In math class he has a tendency to thrive on attention from the teacher and other students. His state mandated math test show that he has limited knowledge in math however, he does not appear to have any learning disabilities. He has stated before that he “just doesn’t get math.”
When Theodore comes to class he is slow to get his math journal, he talks regularly through class and completes his work hesitantly. He misses the opportunity to hand in homework regularly and this is impacting his grade. Sometimes when working on problems he has not worked on previously, he displays a sense of helplessness. He refuses to try to complete the work and simply states he “doesn’t understand” and just sits there blankly. However, Theodore does regularly volunteer to complete bell work problems on the whiteboard. Sometimes he gets the answers right, and when he gets them wrong he just shrugs it off. His talking in class is disruptive and sometimes he misses vital lesson material and prevents others from hearing the message as well.
Review of Theory
Theodore’s behavior problems could best be explained by reviewing two behaviorist theories; those of Guthrie and Skinner.
Guthrie would see Theodore’s behaviors as bad habits. These habits are a response to a large number of stimuli. The stimuli for Theodore could be the school, the math classroom, the math teacher, his class peers and the math assignments. The more these stimuli are experienced, the more the bad habits come to fruition. His inappropriate behaviors in the past cost him little amongst his peers and past teachers may have overlooked his cl...
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...ehavior modification, Theodore can reduce or eliminate his inappropriate behaviors while at the same time increasing behaviors that can further his academic achievements. Guthrie’s focus was on eliciting particular patterns of behavior in particular situations. While Skinner’s approach was more on either ensuring the right reinforcement was added or subtracted to elicit the appropriate behavior. While the theory approaches are different they both can lead to a successful modification that will be useful for Theodore now and the rest of his high school career.
Works Cited
Hill, W. F. (1985). LEARNING A Survey of Psychological Interpretations. In W. F. Hill, LEARNING A Survey of Psychological Interpretations (pp. 33-62). New York: Harper & Row Publishers.
Ormrod, J. E. (2012). Human Learning sixth edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.
Skinner, B.F. A Brief Survey of Operant Behavior. Cambridge, MA: B. F. Skinner Foundation. 1938
F. Skinner focuses on behaviorism which primarily deals with what can be observed and measured. B.F. Skinner believes through operant conditioning you can create desired (or undesired) behaviors in anyone. Operant conditioning is changing behavior through the use of reinforcement after the desired action is given; a behavior that is rewarded positively is more likely to continue and a behavior that is rewarded negatively would likely stop occurring (Santrock,2014). In addition to reinforcement, Skinner also talks about punishment. Reinforcement increases the probability an action or behavior will be repeated, while punishment is intended to decrease a behavior (McLeod, 2015). When Laurie was younger, she thought she was being sent to school every day to socialize with her friends and that learning was a secondary, unintentional happenstance. In third grade, compared to the other students in her class, she was falling short in reading and math. She couldn’t pay attention and often disrupted the class by talking with the people around her. Laurie’s third grade teacher got fed up with her behavior, so she placed Laurie’s desk next to her own in front of the class and then slapped Laurie’s desk with the ruler every time she caught her not paying attention. After a couple months, Laurie no longer required a slap on the desk to pay attention. According to Skinner, this behavior modification is punishment, not reinforcement, as the teacher was trying to decrease Laurie’s preference for daydreaming. However, as a result of not daydreaming, Laurie’s grades improved. Her parent’s began to reward her with $3 for every A she earned, using positive reinforcement to get Laurie to continue performing well. Due to operant conditioning, Laurie passed third grade and remained a top student the rest of her life, graduating from college with honors. If you ask Laurie to
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Matsumoto, D., & Juang, L. (2013). Culture and Psychology (5th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.
Skinner clarified the principles that lay ground work to his psychology. First, Skinner argued that his discipline was completely based in observation. In Skinner's work, theories and hypotheses had a limited role (Weidman). Skinner's approach was drastically empiricist. Second, Skinner said that since psychology was thought to be limited to the level of behavioral observation, it had no need of being condensed to or clarified in terms of physiology (Weidman). Thirdly, for Skinner, processes of the mind or states of the mind were to be understand as behavior (Weidman). B.F. Skinner rejected re...
Weiten, W., Dunn, D.S., Hammer, E.Y. (2011). Psychology Applied to Modern Life. Belmont, Ca. Cengage Learning
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Behavior modification is based on the principles of operant conditioning, which were developed by American behaviorist B.F. Skinner. In his research, he put a rat in a cage later known as the Skinner Box, in which the rat could receive a food pellet by pressing on a bar. The food reward acted as a reinforcement by strengthening the rat's bar-pressing behavior. Skinner studied how the rat's behavior changed in response to differing patterns of reinforcement. By studying the way the rats operated on their environment, Skinner formulated the concept of operant conditioning, through which behavior could be shaped by reinforcement or lack of it. Skinner considered his discovery applicable to a wide range of both human and animal behaviors(“Behavior,” 2001).
...theory was based on classical conditioning in behavior, while Skinner thought behavior could be modified through operant conditioning. However, Tolman’s theory was based more on the aspect of internal cognitive motivations or goals toward behavior and he did not believe in conditioned behavior.
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There are five main contributors to behaviorism. They are Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, B.F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, and Joseph Wolpe. The beh...
B.F. Skinner is a major contributor to the Behavioral Theory of personality, a theory that states that our learning is shaped by positive and negative reinforcement, punishment, modeling, and observation. An individual acts in a certain way, a.k.a. gives a response, and then something happens after the response. In order for an action to be repeated in the future, what happens after the response either encourages the response by offering a reward that brings pleasure or allows an escape from a negative situation. The former is known as positive reinforcement, the latter known as negative reinforcement (Sincero, 2012). A teenager who received money for getting an “A” is being positively reinforced, while an individual who skips a class presentation is being negatively reinforced by escaping from the intense fear and anxiety that would have occurred during the presentation.
Goldstein, E. (2015). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting mind. Research, and everyday experience (4th edition). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning