Now we are going to talk about how to reinforce continuously, and watch some videos on this.

During the learning phase, or when increasing the difficulty or when making new demands in a new location or different circumstances it is best to support the child with  a 1:1 continuous schedule of reinforcement. To do this, you would tag for every response or even every attempt. Every tag would be followed by a primary reinforcer such as a treat, toy or sticker.

A great tool to use to help with reinforcement, is the tagulator. This is a counter with beads that the child pulls down after every tag. Pulling the beads is reinforcing on its own and it also allows the child to keep track of tags. Pulling beads can become reinforcing on its own. The tagulator gives us a way to tag every response, yet reduce the frequency of the primary reinforcer.

Let’s watch a video that demonstrates the mechanics of using a tagulator. There is no behavior being reinforced here, this is just to show how the sequence works of tag, then pull a bead, then deliver the primary reinforcer. The teacher tags and gives the candy. The learner pulls the bead. This provides continuous reinforcement with the conditioned reinforcer and 3 different ratios with the primary reinforcer. The ratio of tags to primary reinforcer is at first 1:1, then 2:1 then variable and is controlled by the bead color pattern on the tagulator.

That was a really cute demonstration of how to use the tagulator. I love them, I think they’re great. Once again, the possibilities are only limited by our imaginations.

We’ve got a video of Lear now learning about the tagulator. Let’s watch this video of Lear as he happily accepts the switch from getting 1 candy for every tag to 1 candy for ever 10 tags.