The Importance Of Reinforcement Of Purpose

The students created endings to this sentence, “Third grade is fun __,” for their morning worksheet. There were multiple students who wrote something like, “Third grade is fun when Mrs. Neal is here,” or “Third grade is fun because Mrs. Neal is my teacher.” Students could raise their hands and tell their classmates their sentence. If they had something wrote about Mrs. Neal she gave them a sticker. She later told me the week before, one person did it so she gave them a sticker and that week about 15 students wrote something nice about Mrs. Neal in their sentence.
This interaction connects to the Behaviorism Perspective because this situation involved positive reinforcement. The reinforcement was the sticker and Mrs. Neal added an opportunity
for the students to earn one. The previous week, the one student who received a sticker and got rewarded made their classmates want to be rewarded too. So the next week, about 15 students wrote something nice about Mrs. Neal and received a sticker of their choice. This supports that a behavior that is reinforced gets increased. The stickers increased the behavior of writing a pleasant sentence about their teacher.