REINFORCEMENT

Reinforcement- Educational Theories

Reinforcement- Educational Theories

Reinforcement

Reinforcement in psychology is the stimulus that reinforces behaviour. It is any result or event, when it is contingent on an earlier response, increases the likelihood that this response appears again in the future. A reinforce or reinforcing stimulus is all that makes the behaviour that caused it to rise. One of the distinctions to be made as to reinforcement is the positive reinforcement or negative reinforcement. Reinforcement idea is the method of forming behaviour by controlling the penalties of the behaviour. In reinforcement, a blend of pays and/or penalties is utilized to reinforce desired behaviour or quench undesired behaviour.

Any behaviour that elicits an outcome is called operant behaviour, because the individual functions on his or her environment. Reinforcement idea concentrates on the connection between the operant behaviour. The associated consequences are occasionally mentioned to as operant conditioning. Reinforcement would help my students to learn to repeat things which are encouraged through positive reinforcement. My students would be able to learn not to repeat the actions and behaviours which can be avoided or suppressed through negative reinforcement (Jones, 2002).

Strategies of reinforcement

Much of human learning goes on without any perceptible reinforcement. Memory occurs, without a deliberate intention to remember in the absence of explicit rewards. In positive reinforcement, the reinforcer is contingent on performance of the instrumental response. A contingency is essentially a rule, in this case one that relates performance of an instrumental behaviour to an outcome, the positive reinforcer. The notion of “contingency” is important to defining instrumental conditioning: The reinforcer is contingent on, or dependent on, the occurrence of a response. In an experiment, control conditions are required to assure that the responding we observe is due to the contingency and are not incidental to some other aspect of the experiment. Non-contingent control conditions are used in which the rewards are programmed independently of the subjects' behaviour. In the contingent relationship, each instance of the action is followed by the outcome. In the non-contingent relationship, outcomes occur independently of the actions (Quin, 2003).

During the initial training of behaviour, a continuous schedule of reward produces more rapid conditioning or a higher level of responding than does a partial reinforcement schedule. If one considers instrumental learning to be a form of trial-and-error learning, then the occasional non-rewards of the partial schedule may lead the subject to try other responses in an attempt to be more successful. Schedules are important because they demonstrate that the rate and patterning of responding are sensitive to the exact reinforcement contingencies. Primary reinforcers reduce biological needs of the organism, such as food does for an empty subject. Other essential reinforcers include water, or relief from excessive heat or cold, or from pain. Other stimuli that function as reinforcers; are derived from primary reinforcers.

Secondary reinforcers are neutral stimuli that have been paired with primary reinforcers and thus acquired the capacity to reinforce on their own. An especially powerful class of reinforcers for human behaviour is social ...