Conditions Affect Behaviors
Conditions Are What Educators Control
Changing Behavior
Instructors seek to change student behavior for the better. Conditioning is the behavioral principle that instructors employ to influence those changes. Instruction presumes that an instructor can an act to increase or decrease specified behaviors as the instructor determines. That’s another way to look at teaching and learning, as the teacher setting conditions to influence student behavior.
A Closer Look
Operant conditioning is the behavioral principle that educators wittingly or unwittingly employ, in which the stimuli that they arrange produce behavior that leads to a consequence that the educator also arranges. The educators shapes students through both the stimuli and the consequence, both to influence the behavior.
An Even Closer Look
Operant conditioning involves three different forms of stimuli.
1. Reinforcement
Stimuli that follow the student’s response reinforce behaviors, meaning to make the response more likely. The most powerful and consistent reinforcements tend to be intrinsic, meaning naturally occurring along with the learning task. Reinforcing stimuli can also be extrinsic, meaning professor controlled and induced, including traditional rewards like compliments or an A grade. Extrinsic reinforcements can also involve relieving the student from a negative condition, like giving the student a pass in class or excusing the student from an arduous written exercise.
2. Punishment
Other stimuli that follow the student’s response punish behavior, meaning to weaken the response. Punishment can, in reverse of reinforcement, be either supplying a negative, like giving a sharp rebuke or awarding a failing grade, or removing a positive, like taking a student off the honor roll or revoking a scholarship. Surprising to some, punishments, while appropriate in instances, tend to work less well than reinforcements.
3. Discrimination
A third form of stimulus, discriminative stimuli, is perhaps the most important to effective instructional design. See if you can discern on your own what discriminative stimuli might be, before reading the next entry. And begin to recognize, if you don’t already, how you naturally deploy reinforcement and punishment, and perhaps also use the more-powerful discriminative stimuli.
