Educational Psychology

In preschool we use token economy every day. Each day the students will get a chart where they get to pick their reward (positive reinforcer) from a select options. Then they carry their charts around throughout the day. We give rewards for any kind of positive behavior, doing their work, being in the correct area, sitting quietly, etc.. Place holder rewards are given for all of these behaviors, the place holder reward is a penny that they velcro onto their chart. Once they earn 5 penny's then they get the reward they chose for just a few minutes and repeat. When they show a negative behavior, we just ignore it. Sometimes if a student is refusing to do a task, we will make the task smaller. Say they have 6 shapes to color, but they wont, we will say okay, if you color 1 shape then we can move onto..... That would be a negative reinforcer. When a student comes into a situation and they want a toy that another student is playing with and they start hitting in order to get that to...

I think that learning is a HUGE process. It is not something that happens quickly. You may be able to learn how to tie your shoes quickly or to ride a two wheeler quickly if you think about each of those tasks in a broad way. But it you break it down, you have to learn a lot of prerequisite skills to those larger skills in order to be able to do them. You are learning how to ride a two wheeler from the time you are born. You have to learn to hold you head up, how to balance while sitting, then how to move your feet independently from one another, how to grasp items, and so many other little things that you don't think of until you really break down and analyze how to ride a two wheeler. Learning comes slowly, yet all at once. It comes so slowly that we don't even see it really. Yet, you will definitely remember the first time your baby smiles at you or the first word they say and you will say "My baby learned to smile today". But your baby didn't learn to smile ...