Reinforcement Schedules
It’s obvious that we can’t reinforce every time, or nearly every time, forever.
Continuous reinforcement is for new behaviors that we’re teaching. The goal is ultimately to have the behavior become reinforcing for it’s own sake.
For example we might at first need to reinforce every step a child takes in one direction to teach safe walking skills. But once the skill is mastered the child will discover that walking is pleasurable for it’s own sake, because he gets to go places and see new things.
If you think about anything you have learned, once you’ve mastered it, you enjoy it a lot more than you did while you were first learning.
Behaviors will happen and become stronger only if they’re reinforced. You can tell when a behavior is becoming self-reinforcing or is being reinforced by the environment, when the learner just starts doing it more and more on their own.
If you look at the old animal training literature you’ll see something called a 2fer and a 3fer. This refers to reinforcement schedules where you give a reinforcer after 2 instances of a behavior happening or after 3 instances.
If you think about it, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. It could be that response #2 was a really great one (but it was not the one to be reinforced) and #3 was not so great (but this was on your schedule to reinforce).
The modern way of implementing intermittent reinforcement is to let it happen naturally as you start reinforcing only the best examples (or the quickest) and leaving off the poorer ones.
This way you’re still reducing the rate of reinforcement, but you’re giving preference to the best examples of the behavior. This is a much better way to introduce variability in the reinforcement, than using an artificial schedule.
Another way to reduce the frequency of the primary reinforcer is to incorporate the behavior into a chain where it will be reinforced by another behavior
Lesson Progress
Lesson Navigation
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Core Lessons - Module 5
- Lesson 5 Topics - TAGteach Session Management
- Getting Started with TAGteach
- Antecedent Arrangement - the environment
- Antecedent Arrangement - prompts
- Antecedent Arrangement - learner in control
- Identifying Reinforcers
- Is it reinforcing, really?
- Reinforcement Schedules
- Fun with Tagulators
- TAGteach Configurations for Success
- Self Tagging
- Peer and Group Tagging
- Peer Tagging in classroom example
- Peer tagging in a sports drill
- TAGteach Without the Tagger
- TAGteach Without the Tagger - video example
- Practice
- Practice - What is Fluency?
- Practice - Why do we need Fluency?
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Supplementary Materials - Module 5
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Homework - Module 5