Effective Learning Environments

The Role of Contingencies of Reinforcement

Behavior analysis has brought the attention of practitioners and scientists to the contingencies that exist in any environment. Such contingencies consist of the events that immediately precede a behavior (antecedents, or A), the behavior (B), the events that immediately follow the behavior (consequences, or C), and the sequences of events that establish or alter the value of the antecedents and consequences, known as establishing operations (EO). Simple three-term contingencies (ABC), plus establishing operations (EO), are powerful tools for creating effective learning environments. Contingencies establish, strengthen, maintain, and weaken the behavior that is exhibited in any environment.

Contingencies establish behavior by providing an occasion sufficient to produce the behavior (stimulus control, or prompting) and ensuring that the behavior produces an outcome that functions as a reinforcer for the behavior (positive reinforcement). In learning environments, these occasions often consist of the teacher providing instructions (stimulus control), demonstrations (prompting), or physical guidance [Page 1287](prompting) sufficient to produce the behavior, which is followed immediately by praise, access to preferred activities or food or drink (positive reinforcement). For example, a teacher may describe how to solve an addition problem that involves carrying while demonstrating the solution to a particular problem and may then move around the room praising the students' efforts as they work such problems on their own. Behavior that escapes or avoids some aversive situation also will be established or strengthened (negative reinforcement). Effective learning environments rely almost exclusively on positive reinforcement contingencies like the one in the example and only rarely on such negative reinforcement contingencies. This approach ensures that the learning environment will continue to be one in which learners participate in learning activities, rather than an environment they seek to escape or avoid.

Contingencies strengthen and maintain behavior by gradually shifting the schedule of reinforcement from continuous to intermittent and then from fixed to variable. A teacher can provide for the shifts in schedules of reinforcement by directing the initial lesson so that it develops some aspect of learners' repertoires. Next, the teacher provides an assignment that requires further practice of the firm and newly firmed skills, with help from the teacher as needed in this semidirected instructional condition. For example, a teacher may direct the learning of the silent e rule by having students respond in unison to many examples of words with and without the silent e and providing praise for each correct response. Once it is clear that students are firm in their correct responding, the teacher can praise every other, then every third correct response. Soon the teacher can provide praise at every fifth correct response, on average, with the number varying between two and nine correct responses. In this way, the students' correct responding becomes firm. Once firm responding is occurring, the teacher can hand out a worksheet designed to provide practice applying the rule. The teacher then moves around the classroom, providing students with help only as needed and praising correct responses only occasionally.

Contingencies weaken behavior by discontinuing reinforcement for the behavior (extinction), temporarily removing a learner from the source of reinforcement for the behavior (time-out), having the behavior result in the loss of reinforcers (response cost), or having the behavior result in something aversive (punishment). Effective learning environments weaken undesirable repertoires by differential reinforcement of desirable repertoires. In such environments, timeout from positive reinforcement or response cost contingencies are used only sparingly, as needed, and punishment contingencies are rarely used. In a differential reinforcement process, the teacher ensures that a reinforcer never immediately follows undesirable behavior (extinction), and a reinforcer always immediately follows desirable behavior (positive reinforcement), at least initially. For example, a teacher in whose class a student is emitting disruptive behavior can simply continue with a lesson, calling on other students who are waiting to be called on and following the planned activities, until the student ceases the disrupting behavior and is waiting to be called on, at which point the teacher calls on that student.

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