Apace of Change

by Damian Bariexca, Ed.D.

Archive for the ‘School Psychology’ Category

Praise vs. Positive Reinforcement

When you work in a school, you are bound to hear something like the following at least once a week, if not more frequently:

“Can we give him more positive reinforcement?”  

“Maybe she just needs more positive reinforcement!”  

“I’ve been giving plenty of positive reinforcement!”

Which is all well and good, but in many of these cases, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, I do not think those words mean what they think they mean.  Too often, we say “positive reinforcement” when we mean “praise”.  The key difference between the two is that praise is fairly objective, while positive reinforcement is subjective.

Praise is a pretty standard entity framed from the perspective of the giver – the person praising is expressing approval or admiration of something someone else did or said.  Positive reinforcement, on the other hand, is framed from the perspective of the receiver.

Before I continue, let’s get some basic behavioral definitions down.  In the world of behavior analysis, these four words can be thought of as:

     Positive: To add something.

     Negative: To remove something.

     Reinforcement: To increase the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.

     Punishment: To decrease the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.

Thus, if we play mix & match with these terms, we get something like this:

     Positive Reinforcement: To add something to increase the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.

     Positive Punishment: To add something to decrease the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.

     Negative Reinforcement: To remove something to increase the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.

     Negative Punishment: To remove something to decrease the likelihood of a behavior occurring again.

Wikipedia has a good, succinct set of examples for each of the above terms (definitions deleted):

  • Positive reinforcement: […] Father gives candy to his daughter when she picks up her toys. If the frequency of picking up the toys increases or stays the same, the candy is a positive reinforcer.
  • Positive punishment: […] Mother yells at a child when running into the street. If the child stops running into the street the yelling is positive punishment.
  • Negative reinforcement: […] Turning off distracting music when trying to work. If the work increases when the music is turned off, turning off the music is a negative reinforcer.
  • Negative punishment (omission training): […] A teenager comes home an hour after curfew and the parents take away the teen’s cell phone for two days. If the frequency of coming home after curfew decreases, the removal of the phone is negative punishment.

Contrary to popular usage, positive reinforcement is NOT necessarily encouragement or praise (“Way to go, Bobby!”).  As you see above, positive reinforcement occurs when you add something (positive) to make a behavior more likely to reoccur (reinforcement).

The tricky thing about reinforcers, as noted above, is that they’re very specific to the individual.  What I find reinforcing, you may not.  For example: I love dark chocolate, so you may tell me that for every 3 psychological reports I write, I’ll get a big chunk of dark chocolate.  Because I really want that dark chocolate, I will be more likely to complete more reports; however, if I make the same deal with you, but you hate the taste of dark chocolate, that will not be a reinforcer for you.

Likewise, we may think that by publicly praising a student we are positively reinforcing some behavior.  That may be true in some cases, but what about the student who hates public attention?  Same goes for candy, high fives, stickers, or whatever other things we’ve tried.  If it doesn’t increase the behavior, it’s not a reinforcer, even if we think it is, or should be.

Much ink has been spilled over both the benefits and detrimental effects of praise on children*, but that’s not what this post is about.  I’m simply seeking to clarify that if we are going to use positive reinforcement with students, we should know exactly what it is as well as what it isn’t.

 

*I’ve had Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards on my “must read” list for far too long.

Shifting My Sharing

Despite the periodic blog posts heralding the death of RSS, I remain a huge fan of the syndication format (not familiar with RSS?  Check the wiki).  I have been an avid user of Google Reader for nearly five years now, and I use it daily to aggregate and read, at last count, nearly 200 blogs, education-related and otherwise.

Until recently, one of my favorite features of Google Reader has been the ability to “share” (read: publish) interesting articles to my own personal RSS feed, which I cross-published to my Twitter account and on a sidebar feed on my portfolio website.  Additionally, Google Reader users could subscribe to each other’s Shared Items feeds right in Reader, which was a great way for me to read the posts my friends found insightful or useful without having to rely on Facebook or Twitter, where they would be too likely to be overlooked due to the high signal to noise ratio.

This past fall, however, Google saw fit to remove the sharing function (the generic nature of which allowed users to publish to just about any service) and replace it with a “Share to Google+” button (which forces users to use their social networking product to share stories).   This turned an incredibly powerful, relatively open publishing platform into yet another walled garden, a move I (sort of) understand from a business standpoint, but one that frustrated me immensely as a user.

Despite Google’s shortsightedness, I’ve still been able to rely on RSS to help me concoct another solution for when I want to share interesting articles from my Reader.  I have repurposed my Delicious account to be my surrogate Shared Items feed.  If you would like to read the articles I find interesting, you can now find them at Delicious.com/damian613 (or if you use RSS too, subscribe to the feed).

So what happened to the existing items in my Delicious account, the special education/school psychology related bookmarks (that I also published to my portfolio website)?  Simple – I moved them all over to Diigo (RSS feed), with tags intact.

If you’re interested in either my shared bookmarks in special ed/school psychology or the blogposts I share periodically in the areas of technology & education, please feel free to drop by my Delicious & Diigo accounts, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feeds (while the format is still alive!).

TL;DR: Moved some of my public stuff around:

Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know

Full disclosure: The author of this reference guide sent me an unsolicited complimentary copy in 2010.  There was never any discussion of me mentioning it on my blog, nor did I receive any compensation for the following post.

Assistive technology (AT) can be a daunting topic for some educators to wrap their collective heads around.  The word “technology” itself can strike fear into the hearts of some, and assistive technology* (as traditionally defined in the educational world, anyway) has a reputation for being prohibitively expensive.  What I like about Dr. Brian Friedlander‘s reference guide Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know is that it provides a basic overview of assistive technology – what it is, how it helps – as well as solutions, organized by category, making it a very accessible entree into AT.

One component I think educators will appreciate is the section entitled, “Low-Tech Options”.  Dr. Friedlander reminds the reader that “technology” need not be shiny things that beep; “pencil grips, highlighting tape, and tape recorders” (Friedlander, 2010, p. 1) are just some examples of easily overlooked technology options that may help students.  My own observations and experience with tools such as whisperphones support this; “technology” is a very large umbrella under which many different tools fall.

Beyond that, Dr. Friedlander explains the federal definition of “assistive technology” and provides overviews of AT evaluations and the theory of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), as well as how that ties in to AT.  He goes on to provide several examples of technology solutions that may help students in the areas of accessibility (e.g., keyboard, mouse, dictation, text-to-speech, general OS accessibility settings), writing, math, reading, and organization.  Pricing information for these resources is not included in the guide, but some of the resources he mentions are already built in to Windows and Mac operating systems, and others I know run the gamut from free to… well, not-free, I suppose, but at least there are options.

The four-page laminated guide concludes with a list of online resources for further information/support with assistive technology, including free access to audiobooks, more information on UDL, and links to “evidence-based practices for integrating instructional technology to support the achievement of all students” (Friedlander, 2010, p. 4).

While I think every educator could benefit from this overview of assistive technology, I imagine it would be of particular interest to special education teachers, Child Study Team members, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and administrators who may want to implement AT solutions with their students, but aren’t quite sure where to start.  This is not an exhaustive tome on AT, nor is it meant to be – it gives the reader some jumping-off points for further exploration, which is sometimes all that is needed in order to move in the right direction.

Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know is available from National Professional Resources, Inc., and starts at $12.95 apiece for the first 1-10 copies (discounts are available for bulk purchases).

 

*Really, don’t we all use assistive technology every day?  How did you get to work?  How did your meals get cooked?  How did you record your thoughts on paper or in digital form?  

 

Reference

Friedlander, B.  (2010).   Assistive Technology: What Every Educator Needs to Know.  Port Chester, NY: National Professional Resources, Inc.

Incidental Learning

I spent the better part of my day today observing lessons in a variety of fourth and sixth grade classrooms.  While I always enjoy getting into the classrooms (and participating, when I’m allowed!), it’s always a welcome bonus when I learn something new while doing it, either about one of my students, about the subject matter, or about teaching techniques or tools.

Today I learned about two teaching techniques that were new to me.  You may have been using these for years, and if so, I’d like to hear about your experiences with them.  If not, feel free to take and use these as you see fit.

WhisperPhone

In one class, I initially thought I misheard when students were instructed to take out their “whisperphones” and start reading independently after they finished a task.  I Googled “whisperphone” on my non-whispering phone right there and found that it is indeed an actual product line.  The version I saw was a little plastic “handset” into which students read quietly; my understanding is that the handset (or headset) acts as a voice-feedback device that allows speakers to hear phonemes more clearly.  I can’t say for sure, never having seen this before this morning, but take a look at the company’s research page and come to your own conclusions.

Foursquare Plus 3

In my English teacher days, I used to have students use graphic organizers or plan sheets to organize their thoughts.   Today I learned about a slightly different take on graphic organizers: Foursquare Plus 3.

I’ve written and deleted several attempts at an explanation, but wasn’t satisfied with any of them.  Check this slideshow for an explanation instead (it’s the only result for “foursquare” on Google that doesn’t return something related to the location check-in site).

Do you have any experience with Foursquare Plus 3 or the WhisperPhone, good, bad, or otherwise?  See anything new here you might be giving a try?  Leave a comment!

Online Learning: My Pre-Test

I recently took an online professional development course offered by the Massachussetts School Psychologists Association entitled Ethics 102: The Ethical Practitioner.  It provided me with ten hours of NASP-approved PD, plus helped me satisfy my National Certification in School Psychology requirement of three hours of ethics training per three-year renewal cycle (my new cycle just started at the end of July).

Beyond the immediate benefits, however, I thought it would be a good “dry run” of online learning for me, as my upcoming doctoral program is a hybrid online/F2F format.  Having been through graduate school once before, I’m familiar with the F2F part, but I’m curious as to what the online part will look like.  With my first online learning experience now behind me, I thought I’d write down some of my initial reflections on the process.  Please note that what follows is not a critique or endorsement of the content of this program, but rather the online format.

Benefits

My biggest takeaway from this experience was how much I liked setting my own pace and focus.  This course covered a broad array of topics under the “ethics” umbrella, and as I expected, I was more knowledgeable in some areas than others.  The fact that this course was available online meant that I didn’t have to sit in a lecture hall or hotel conference room and be spoken to (or worse, read a PowerPoint).  I was able to wear what was comfortable and sit where I wanted (I completed most of this course horizontal on my living room sofa).  I was able to skim over some parts, and spend more time focusing on others, both in reading more closely and in utilizing external resources to learn more.  While the course provides the same content for anyone who takes it, the asynchronous nature of the delivery allows for greater differentiation than the standard lecture hall setting.

Limitations

That said, I acknowledge that reading text is far and away my preferred method of receiving information.  I’d sooner sit and read than watch a video or listen to a recording, at least for academic purposes.  As such, this particular course was right up my alley (about 200 pages or so of reading), but I can see how folks with preferences for audio or video might find this format limiting or off-putting.  Also, while the course did allow for self-reflection with some case study-style exercises, the drawback to self-study is that you’ve only got yourself to work with.  Here is where having someone else in the room to bounce ideas off of or discuss options with would come in handy.

Final Thoughts

As part of the course evaluation, I left this comment for the folks at MSPA:

I would be very likely to take another online-only course for NASP-approved hours.  I am not always able to attend NASP-approved events in my area due to my own professional and personal scheduling constraints, and I applaud the MSPA and NASP for promoting online learning opportunities for their members.  I wish more state associations would follow suit.

My own state school psychologists association usually has two conferences a year, but I have only been able to attend one or two in the last six due to demands at work.  The national association convention is in a different city every year, and long-distance travel hasn’t been in my budget for some time (although I do hope to attend the 2012 NASP Convention right here in Philadelphia!).  That leaves me very few options for obtaining those necessary NASP-approved hours, but this course really fit the bill.

Although doctoral study will obviously be much more in-depth than a single PD course, I thought the experience would be a nice teaser of what’s to come.  I’m happy to say that I enjoyed my first major formal online learning experience, and I’m looking forward even more to starting the hybrid online/F2F format in a few weeks.