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home / study / social sciences / psychology / psychology questions and answers / For The Assessment: Carrie Ann Has A Tendency To Procrastinate Before Completing Her Assignments. ... Your question has been posted. We'll notify you when a Chegg Expert has answered. Post another question. . Question: For the assessment: Carrie Ann has a tendency to procrastinate before completing her assignments.... Edit question For the assessment: Carrie Ann has a tendency to procrastinate before completing her assignments. Between family, job, and school work, she has a busy schedule and often does not feel up to the task of trying to understand what is expected for assignments. Between her busy schedule and anxiety about doing the tasks required for assignments, she tends to wait until the day before an assignment is due to begin work on it. Because her work is rushed, she ends up not doing her best work. She would very much like to begin her work sooner, but each time she has an assignment due she ends up repeating the procrastination. Carrie Ann has decided to use operant conditioning principles to help her develop better habits in completing assignments. Carrie Ann will need to develop a target goal and plan for herself. Instructions: •Provide an introduction that discusses operant conditioning behavioral learning principles and how they are relevant to changing behavior. •Identify a specific target goal for a behavior change plan. •Describe a behavioral plan. •Describe how the behavior can be shaped through operant conditioning principles. •Identify and apply specific reinforcers that are part of the plan. •Apply a schedule of reinforcement that would be used for each reinforcer that is part of the plan. •Using information from at least two scholarly sources, describe what research shows about how operant conditioning can be used to change behavior.

Explanation / Answer

• Provide an introduction that discusses operant conditioning behavioral learning principles and how they are relevant to changing behavior.

The underlying idea in Operant Conditioning behaviour learning is that people act in ways that maximize their outcomes, where outcomes are defined as the presence of reinforcers and the absence of punishers. Reinforcement is strengthening of beahviour and it can be help a person to learn or increase a behaviour. Operant Conditioning asserts that presenting a positive stimulus (positive reinforcement) or removing a negative stimulus (negatie reinforcement), immediately after the behavior has occurred, reinforces the behaviour.

And similarly in the case of Punishment, presenting an aversive stimulus(presentation punishment) or removing a positive stimulus(removal punishment) immediately after the behavior has occurred, weakens the behaviour.

• Identify a specific target goal for a behavior change plan

To identify the specific target goal, we need to first identify the problem bahviour, which should be as specific as possible. So, the Problem Bahviour is - "Putting off working on a assignment until the day before".

Like the problem, the target behavior should also be specific and it depends on what behaviours you would have to change in order for you to attain your goal. In addition to being specific, the goal should also be realistic. For ex., if the goal is as unrealistic as to stop procrastinating and study more consistently, Carrie may be tempted to aim for completing assignment the same day she gets one. But this goal maybackfire, since it is such a drastic change from the present behavior that she risks burning herself out within a few days, and then dropping the whole program.

So, a realistic target behaviour could be "To complete the assignment 2 days before its due".

•Describe a behavioral plan

1. Firstly, all the discriminative stimuli need to be considered, ie avoiding, or reducing the incidence of those stimuli which are weaking the behaviour of finishing assignments on time. For example, in Carrie Ann's case, she should identify the events that lead to her being anxious and work on reducing those stimulus.

2. The important part of the plan is to make a schedule of frequent reinforcement which involves creating a contract in which we specify the reinforcer(s) one will receive for particular accomplishments.

So for the first month of this plan, the contract would be :

a. For each assignment that is 50% completed 2 days before its due, an extra 60 minutes of TV watching is allowed.

b. If the assignment is 25% complete 2 days before it is dues, then, 30 minutes of TV.

c. Also, if all the assignments of a particular week were 50% done 2 days before they were due, an outing in mall for the weekend would be the reinforcement.

For the next month, the similar reinforcements could be set but for more percentage of assignment completed 2 days before.

So, the above contract includes both short-term and long-term rewards for better behaviour modification

• Describe how the behavior can be shaped through operant conditioning principles.

Thus positive reinforcement mentioned above in the behavioural plan, i.e. extra TV viewing time, will strengthen Claire Anns behaviour of of starting assignments early and weaken the habit of procrastination and every time she receives the reward it will increaase the probability that next time she starts the assignment on time and not a day before.

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