For the assessment: Carrie Ann has a tendency to procrastinate before completing
ID: 3488097 • Letter: F
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.
Directions:
Describe a plan for meeting a goal. Include the following elements in the description of your change plan:
Describe the specific goal.
Describe how the concept of "shaping" (a behavioral learning theory term) can be employed to help in incremental progress toward the goal. Identify what reinforcers (both primary and secondary) you could apply to make progress toward the goal.
Describe the schedule of reinforcement for the application of the reinforcers. For example, the person losing weight (described in Option B) might treat himself to a movie for the first week where he exercised for at least 40 minutes each day. In this case, the movie would be a positive primary reinforcer delivered on a fixed ratio schedule.
Explanation / Answer
Carrie Ann must develop the following target plan-
For completing the goal she needs to break the target behavior into tangible small tasks. She first needs to focus on identifyin g the factors which stop her form achieving her goal. After identification she need to break the task into smaller targets. Like, for example, if she has to make a presentation on any topic, she should break the whole behavior, into small targets- these could be, 1. Of collecting the data for ppt, 2. Organizing the data, 3. Making the first two slides of ppt, 4, completing the ppt, 5. Reviewing the ppt. these tasks may be carried out in one day, she may also break the steps to be completed within two days. After completing the first task she may give herself a treat of her favorite burger or coffee. On next completion or meeting of the target, she should reward herself with a pen which she was wishing to buy from a long time. This will help her shape her behavior in the manner she desires.
She should follow a fixed ratio schedule, that is, each time she completes a task she needs to reinforce and reward herself. This reward may be something tangible and outwardly visible; she may go and eat her favorite chocolate or have a dinner outside. She may also ask her friends to reinforce her, for this behavior by giving compliments on successful and timely completion of the work done.
Following these steps she may deal with her issue of procrastination.