Week 6 Behaviorism

1. Contiguity learning is learning involving association. Outside of class, I learned to associate different jingles with different ideas or companies. Many jingles that stopped playing years ago are still in my head. In the school setting, I have come to associate apples with teachers, especially the apples on Mac Computers.
2. Some very effective reinforcements that I observed in elementary school involved rewards. In the upper grades, we had the opportunity to earn money for good behavior, completed assignments, etc. We could then take the money we earned and buy things like pop, candy, and small toys. It was a lot of fun. This is an example of a token economy. Another really good reinforcement was positive praise. This worked for me, because I tend to respond better with positivity as opposed to negativity or neglect.
3. There are several different kinds of reinforcement schedules. These include continuous and intermittent schedules. Under intermittent schedules there are ratio, interval, fixed, and variable schedules. All of these have different purposes, advantages, and disadvantages. I would want to start off with continuous reinforcement schedule, especially when students are learning a new behavior and new concepts. The reinforcement is needed to help them see what is appropriate and what is not. As students get used to the behavior and exhibit it properly, you can use intermittent schedules. I think that I would really use the variable schedule in my classroom. The variable schedules allow more flexibility and are really effective because students have no idea when the reinforcement is going to come. It's kind of like being in a stadium and waiting to catch a fly ball. You never know when one is going to come so you will always be paying attention to the game. The idea is that the students have no idea when the reinforcements will come and so they will tend to be on their best behavior more.
4.One thing that with behaviorism that I think kind of contradicts the gospel is that it is so dependent on the environment and how it acts upon us. So many of our learned and natural behaviors are explained by how our environment acts on us. In a sense, our agency is limited or taken away because of our environment and the different factors that act upon us. In 2 Nephi 2:26 it says, "And the Messiah cometh in the fulness of time, that he may redeem the children of men from the fall. And because that they are redeemed from the fall they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves and not to be acted upon, save it be by the punishment of the law at the great and last day, according to the commandments which God hath given." This clearly states that we have the power to act and not let anything, including our environment, act upon us. We can choose how we will react and change those responses that seem so natural. There are many times when people continue to live the gospel even when it is hard and there aren't any immediate rewards. According to behaviorsim, these individuals would have given up living the gospel awhile ago, because there wasn't any positive reinforcement. We have the agency to choose how we will react.