Preparation The goal is to achieve academic excellence Instructions: 1.think abo
ID: 3488931 • Letter: P
Question
Preparation The goal is to achieve academic excellence Instructions: 1.think about how operant conditioning behavioral learning principles can be used to help you reach the goal. 2. Create a plan for meeting the goal by applying operant conditioning behavioral learning principles 3.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.
Explanation / Answer
1. Operant conditioning is a type of learning where the behavior is controlled by its consequences. Positive and negative reinforcement post a behavior can help manipulate the behavior that occurs in future. This means that the same principle can be used to help reach a goal. Once the goal is determined, positive rewards to look forward to may motivate a person to achieve them. For instance, a person wants to lose weight, then a reward to stick to their diet and maintain physical exercise throughout the week can be given to themselves in order to motivate. This could be something like buying your favorite book or meeting a friend that you were longing to.
2. Plan for meeting a goal by applying these principles could be as follows:
For instance, aggressive hitting of a person needs to be brought under control then punishment every time that behavior occurs is inevitable to inculcate change.
Behavior---> Punishment
Improvement in behavior-----> Reward
Such a plan may help build boundaries in cases where behavior management becomes a must. Such therapeutic techniques are used often with oppositional defiant children or with conduct disorder cases.
3. This is a behavioral term that refers to gradually modifying or training an organism to perform a specific response (behavior) by reinforcing any responses that are similar to the desired response. The term used for this is called sucessive approximations. For example, a researcher can use shaping to train a rat to press a lever during an experiment (since rats are not born with the instinct to press a lever in a cage during an experiment). To start, the researcher may reward the rat when it makes any movement at all in the direction of the lever. Then, the rat has to actually take a step toward the lever to get rewarded. The primary and secondary reinforcers that could be used for progressing towards a goal could be food, a favorite drink and that of secondary could be a token or money.