1. A teacher asks your help in planning a behavioral intervention that will help
ID: 3462240 • Letter: 1
Question
1. A teacher asks your help in planning a behavioral intervention that will help manage the behavior of a problem child in his classroom. The child does not stay at her desk when asked to do so, does not remain quiet during “quiet times,” and exhibits other behaviors that disrupt the teaching environment.
Explain specifically how a positive reinforcer, such as candy or small toys, might be used as part of a multiple-baseline across behaviors design to improve the child’s behavior.
2. The police force of a large city had to decide between two different approaches to keeping the officers on the force informed about the changes in laws. An enlightened administrator of this force decided to put the two approaches to test in a research study. She decided to do a true experiment and assigned 30 officers randomly to each of the two programs for a period of 6 months. At the end of this time, all the officers who successfully completed the training under the two approaches were given a final test on their knowledge of the law. The 20 officers who completed Program A showed a reliably higher mean score on this test than did the 28 officers who completed Program B. The administrator wisely chose not to accept these results as decisive evidence of the effectiveness of the two programs.
Using only the information presented in this summary, explain why the administrator made her decision. Specifically, what threat to internal validity did she identify?
How might her decision differ if only 20 officers in each group completed their program (from the original 30 assigned to each), and there still remained a sizable difference favoring Program A?
Can the administrator say that either program is effective?
Explanation / Answer
Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.
(Answer) (1) If a mother were to teach her child the value of a clean home, she would have to teach her child to clean the house or his room by himself. This is because the child would learn about the hard work that involves cleaning a room or house and the child would value the work and even keep their room clean.
Similarly, if the teacher wants the cooperation of the other students, she would have to talk to them about helping her out in keeping the class disciplined and quiet during study time. The children might understand the hard work that entails keeping a class disciplined and may possibly join in helping her teach the unruly child how to behave.
The teacher might give a collective lesson on social etiquette and might instruct the children to help her maintain this cordial environment. If the students help her out in making sure that the class is disciplined, they might understand the teacher’s difficult task of disciplining the other student. Furthermore, operant conditioning of positive reinforcement (reward) or punishment (taking something away) might be included. However, for conditioning to work successfully, it should be paired with therapy or counselling in this case and the conditioning should be continuous. Furthermore, the conditioning should be continued until it becomes a part of the child’s behaviour, it not, it could result in a relapse of the previous behaviour.
Later on, the teacher would have to conduct and ABA test and take away the reward or punishment in order to test if the conditioning actually worked on the child.
(2) When one calculates mean scores like the officer did in the illustration above, the scores are divided by the total number of individuals whose scores were considered. For instance, if classroom A of 10 students ate 20 chocolates, it would be an average of 2 chocolates each. However, if classroom B of 5 students ate 15 chocolates, the total chocolates are less than 20 from classroom A but, the 5 students ate 3 chocolates each. Therefore, since the total number of officers from programme A and B is not the same total of 30, there is a relative difference in the scores.
The officer has found out that the validity of the test can only be determined if the mean scores are calculated between the same number of people in both programmes.
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