Often students and professors will come across scholarly articles, media reports, videos, or psychological principles that at least partially conflict with one another. As with the Reactions Papers, these papers are opinion-based.

This week’s assignment: Compare and contrast the Premack Principle to Positive Reinforcement taking into consideration what I have written below.

Teacher leave those kids alone!

The Premack Principle appears to expand how the instrumental conditioning process is applied to a real world situation. This principle views food not as the reward but rather the activity of eating is what is reinforcing (Premack, 1962). Further, if we can rank behaviors in terms of preference, a more probable activity can be used to reinforce a less probable one. So letting kids run around out of control can actually reinforce quiet behavior? Does it make sense for kindergarten teachers to utilize this unorthodox approach?

Can you ever have too much positive reinforcement?

See below for more information on the study (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973) included in Chapter 4 PowerPoint, slides 44-45. These researchers observed 51 preschoolers while undertaking one of their favorite pastimes coloring. They broke them into three groups:

Expected-reward condition (reinforcement) before they started coloring they told the children: if you do a lot of coloring today well give you some candy and cookies.
Unexpected-reward condition (reinforcement) after they did the coloring they came in with candy and cookies and said heres your reward for coloring today.
No-reward condition (no reinforcement) just let them have their usual day having fun coloring.
The next day they found that the no-reward group did the most coloring. Do you think rewards can undermine intrinsic motivations (overjustification)?

Bring in one additional report (journal article, magazine, newspaper, Internet, etc.) that is related in some way to this topic (in-text citation & references).

General Instructions for Compare & Contrast Paper:

Use APA format for in-text citations and references
Paper length is 700 words (minimum and maximum), not including the cover or reference pages.