Title: Reinforcing Replacement Behaviors
Time: 2 hours
Intended Audience: Pre-K through 12th grade educators.
Short Description:
· The difference between a reward and reinforcement. The two terms are inappropriate interchanged in dialogue and this has caused a lot of confusion on how we change behavior. A reward is something given for the sake of giving. A reinforcer is something that encourages or discourages a behavior. For instance, I do not speed because the thought of losing money through a ticket is not something I want to do. Despite knowing the consequences, there are some people who do not care about the ticket because they know they will get away with the speeding 9 times out of 10. How do we reinforce students who seemingly do not care what will happen?
· Dr. Riffel has been conducting research on reinforcement since 2004. She began this because she walked into a school that was giving away bicycles to students who were caught being good. Dr. Riffel does not believe in tangible reinforcers for students. Her research found that these are not the things students will work for anyway.
Long Description:
· In 2004, Dr. Riffel walked into a middle school that was doing a monthly drawing from students who had been caught being good and one student would win a bicycle. There were over 1000 students in the building and this meant the odds of winning a bicycle were slim to none. After several months, students quit trying. There were so many things wrong with this scenario. The first being that a once-a-month reinforcement would work for all students and that the opportunity to earn something tangible would be reinforcing for all students. This was their only level of reinforcement.
· We immediately went out and bought spiral notebooks and started walking in schools and asking students during class changing period at the secondary level and recess at the elementary level, “What would mean the world to you? What could an adult give you that would let you know you had done a good job, but it can’t cost any money?” In all the years since then only one student has broken the code and named something tangible. It was a fifth grader in Wyoming who said, “Food would be nice.” (You know what we found out when we inquired). We found that students do not want tangibles.
· We later broke their answers down into categories after reading Chapman and White’s 2012 research on “Appreciation in the Workplace”. We found a set of categories that all the answers fit into from Pre-K through 12th grade.
· Dr. Riffel will share rationale behind reinforcement and schedules of reinforcement. She will also share a resource with over 70 pages of reinforcers based on research gathered from real students since 2004.