For the assessment: Carrie Ann has a tendency to procrastinate before completing
ID: 3488099 • 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. Instructions: •Schedule of Reinforcement (one or more of the following): Fixed ratio. Variable ratio. Fixed interval. Variable interval.
Explanation / Answer
Carrie Ann has to first identify the factors which are leading her to procrastinate. If the factors are identified, she will be better able to complete her work on time and do complete justice to the work at hand. She has very aptly said that she will use operant conditioning principles to deal with the issue of procrastination. Operant conditioning is a procedure for learning new behavioral patterns and the learner himself or herself contingent upon the environment to learn the new behaviors. She must use a positive reinforce each time she completes a job. No matter how small the job is, yet she has to positively reinforce herself for completing the work on time. 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.
She needs to develop small goals or needs to break the complete task into tangible and small steps. After reaching the target of competing the portion of the work, she should reinforce her behavior. She needs to also plan for punishment she will give to self for not completing the work on time. This punishment may even be in the form of withdrawing from watching her favorite TV show.
In this manner, she would be able to develop her skill of competing the work on time and getting rid of the habit of procrastinating.