Behaviorism in Education: Punished by Rewards

Is behaviorism in education the bees knees or a blight? 

Does a teacher giving out gold stars sound great or ghastly?

There is a contingency of folks in the alternative education world that are die-hard anti-behaviorists because they believe it is a ghastly blight. 

One popular source of this ire is a book-length case against “behaviorism” as a tool for school and classroom management called Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn. 

Kohn makes some good points about ineffective school management practices, but from my perspective he misrepresents and/or misunderstands the science of behaviorism. 

I’m a Behaviorist

I consider myself to be a behaviorist since I have participated in the training of both rats in scientific experiments and pack llamas in the real world. 

Having lived on a llama ranch for years and worked with them on pack trips into the wilds of Oregon and Washington I have both practical and theoretical understanding. 

I have directly observed extremely skilled animal trainers who were not behavioral scientists. 

I also have a co-author credit on a published research paper in a well respected peer-reviewed behaviorist publication. 

I mention my minimal behaviorist credentials because for decades I have participated in some of those alternative school communities which often have a decidedly anti-behaviorist attitude. 

But what I discovered in the process of being formally trained in the theory and practice of scientific behaviorism is that there are significant assumptions made by practicing behavioral scientists that are ignored in the applications of behaviorism in education in mainstream K-12 schools. 

This was brought home to me by an interesting challenge posed in a class I was taking from Reed College emeritus professor Allen Neuringer, who was acquainted with B.F. Skinner himself, one of the founders of behaviorism. 

He had us read a chapter of Alfie Kohn's book and at the same time a chapter from Karen Pryor's book Don't Shoot the Dog. 

Both are excellent books and I highly recommend them. 

Pryor believes that behaviorism in education could be the solution to most of the world's problems while Kohn believes that it is a heinous crime against humanity. 

They both oversell their positions and, for contrast, I have overstated theirs.  

The question Professor Neuringer posed was, “Who's right?” 

They are firmly entrenched on opposite sides of the question of whether behaviorism in education works or not. 

So whom should we believe? 

My answer is that they are both right and we should believe both of them. 

But that only makes sense if you accept my contention that while they both use the term “behaviorism” they are not, in fact, talking about the same thing. 

Almost everything that Pryor references as effective practice in behaviorism is confined to dealing with people and other animals one-on-one. 

On the other hand, almost everything that Kohn references as ineffective behavioral practice is confined to dealing with groups, especially behaviorism in education. 

What I suggest is that Alfie Kohn was not talking about behaviorism, at least not as it is practiced by scientists. 

He was talking about a version of “behaviorism in education” that appears in mainstream K-12 schools.

They borrow the name but fail to bring with it key assumptions. 

If those assumptions were brought along then they would guide teachers and administrators to different means of managing the behaviors of children and, if I am correct, then much of Kohn's criticisms would no longer be valid.

Behavioral Science Assumptions

In my experience of behavioral research there are some interesting things that are essentially assumed. 

My co-author credit is for a 2014 article in the Journal For The Experimental Analysis of Behavior, a leading behavioral science journal. 

The article is about a set of experiments co-created by graduate student Lavinia Tan and Professor Tim Hackenberg and conducted with the participation of a class of undergraduates, myself included. 

I am going to quote for you one paragraph of that paper which is interesting because of how it can illuminate certain assumptions behind behaviorist research. 

Ten male Long Evans rats served as subjects, five in each phase of the experiment, which were conducted separately, several months apart. Rats were approximately four months old at the start of the experiment, and pair-housed. Note that due to the odd number of rats per phase, one subject in each group of five was housed with a sixth rat not used in this experiment. Colony rooms were programmed on a 12 hour light/dark cycle. Food was restricted 22 hours before experimental sessions.

First thing to notice is our subjects. 

“Long Evans” refers to a specially bred strain of rats that are supposed to be ideally suited to behavioral research. 

Notice that they were housed in pairs so that they always had access to a playmate. 

Notice that we restricted their access to food as experimental sessions approached. 

When your work depends on a rat eating food there is no point in doing the experiment if he is not hungry. 

Another way that experimenters can manipulate the effects of reinforcement is to take note of each rat’s individual preference for different flavored pellets, though that was not relevant in our experiment. 

Our experiment involved just the observation of feeding itself, but if the experiment was about specific behaviors that rats are not inherently inclined to do, then “shaping” would be done to ensure that the rats are at least minimally capable of doing something like the desired behavior. 

The term “shaping” refers to reinforcing certain spontaneous behaviors to encourage them to act in the ways that the experimenter needs them to behave. 

For instance, rats are not inherently inclined to press levers for food which is a typical behavior required in scientific research. 

They have to go through a process of behavioral shaping in order to be able to reliably exhibit that behavior when they are hungry. 

While the process starts with spontaneous behavior it can lead to quite extraordinary feats. 

You can see how elaborate animal training can become by checking out YouTube. 

I have collected a few choice examples for your convenience on my YouTube channel in a playlist under the name “Behavioral Training” (URL: https://bit.ly/3CGIrRN). 

The first one is of B.F. Skinner himself demonstrating shaping on a pigeon (URL: https://buff.ly/3OpLNuT).

One final thing to note is that behavioral research has been carried out almost exclusively with individual animals, not groups. 

The experiment that we conducted was innovative because it dealt with five rats simultaneously in one large box. 

We did not even attempt to train any specific behaviors; we were interested in how they would distribute their eating behaviors across two sources of food without training. 

Our box dispensed food at certain times at two different spots regardless of behavior.

So in behavioral science articles, they use a well-established shorthand to encode assumptions about breeding, feeding, and preliminary training plus they normally deal with only one animal at a time. 

That makes complete sense for behavioral scientists because they all presumably know what their colleagues are talking about and the frameworks they use are focused on the behavior of individuals. 

They are psychologists, not sociologists.

But when behaviorism gets translated into schooling, then we should question whether or not those assumptions still hold true and, if not, raise doubts about whether the result should properly be called “behaviorism.” 

Despite this fact, many behaviorists count the applications in schools as a vindication of their work because those applications are measurably effective. 

One example I'm aware of is in the book The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives & Our World by Anthony Biglan. 

The use of behaviorism in education is also notoriously controversial. 

Newer programs avoid using the term “behaviorist” for fear of political backlash. 

If they use the term “behavior” they usually attach the word “positive” to frame their program favorably and avoid associations with some very cruel animal experiments from the past that do not sit well with the general public. 

So this brings us back to the question: Does behaviorism in education work or doesn't it? 

If the behaviorists are taking credit for applications in schools and have data to support their case, doesn't that mean it works? 

But then there is the controversy over these programs; if they really work then why the controversy?

Behaviorism in Education

Let's think about what we should expect if the behaviorism that scientists study were to be applied in schools. 

First, we would need to breed “Long Evans” children through a selective breeding program. 

Maybe I'm cynical, but I don't think that is going to go over well. 

Next, we need to take total control of the living conditions of the children 24/7/365. 

Do you think that will go over any better than a selective breeding program would? I don’t.

Next, we need to make sure that each child gets the individual shaping that they need to enact the behaviors of schooling since we know that children are not naturally predisposed to sitting still and blindly obeying instructions for hours on end. 

This means that a specialist trainer needs to spend time with each individual child observing their spontaneous behaviors and selectively reinforcing the ones that are approximately what they will eventually be expected to do in the classroom. 

How do you think one-on-one training for every single child in public schools will go over in your state capital during the budget battle? 

Not to mention the fact that there are extremely few people with the appropriate qualifications for that kind of behavioral shaping process. 

So far, scientific behaviorism does not seem to be very practical. 

Is behaviorism in schools doomed to failure given all these different problems? 

It's like the old joke about a couple of hikers and a bear. 

Two hikers wake up in the morning to discover a bear looking at them. 

The bear starts to charge. One hiker starts to put on his shoes. 

The other says, “What are you doing? You can't out run a bear!” 

He replies, “I don't need to out run the bear, I just need to out run you.”

Innovations in the field of school management just need to out run the default management model in schools. 

That default school management model is based on managing children by merely exerting authority, just telling them what to do. 

Anthony Biglan’s evidence for the effectiveness of behavioral science as applied in schools were measured against default management techniques, not competing theories of motivation. 

Yes, focused efforts to manipulate behavior can be more effective than the default management techniques that teachers use in the classroom, which are either based on non-scientific models of human motivation or are embedded in institutions that prevent the application of the science by being overly prescriptive. 

To test an economist’s notion to improve grades and test scores, some funders were convinced to fund experiments in which schools paid for grades or some other desired educational behavior. 

Here is how journalist Paul Tough reported on these studies in his New York Times best-selling book How Children Succeed:

In recent years, the Harvard economist Roland Fryer ... tested several different incentive programs in public schools — offering bonuses to teachers if they improved their classes' test results; offering incentives like cell phone minutes to students if they improve their own test results; offering families financial incentives if their children did better. The experiments were painstaking and carefully run — and the results have been almost uniformly disappointing. There are a couple of bright spots in the data—in Dallas, a program that paid young kids for each book they read seems to have contributed to better reading scores for English-speaking students. But for the most part, the programs were a bust. The biggest experiment, which offered incentives to teachers in New York City, cost $75 million and took three years to conduct. And in the spring of 2011, Fryer reported that it had produced no positive results at all. (p.66)

So far their results have been underwhelming and the ones with the most promise are where the results might be better explained by how they may have accidentally provided, in addition to their incentives, the kinds of support that would be consistent with the leading non-behaviorist model of human motivation, Self-Determination Theory. 

The experiments applied a variation on the theme of behaviorism and failed.

We can do better if we apply the science properly.

Returning to the assumptions embedded in behaviorist literature, it is absurd to even consider what it would mean to breed children for success in schools or to take total control of their living conditions. 

However, mainstream schools can do a much better job of controlling student's living conditions while at school, paying attention to their preferences, and making good use of their spontaneous behaviors. 

In fact, there are schools that already do all these things, but those schools have been largely ignored for the past one hundred years. 

In fact, the schools themselves have traditionally talked about their own practices in ways that disguise why and how they actually work. 

Very recently they have started to get more attention, but they are a long way from causing systemic change. 

Their limited impact may be at least partly due to their inability to specify scientifically respectable principles behind their practices. 

These schools also happen to have tended to be hostile to behaviorism, as mentioned before. 

There are three kinds of schools that I know maintain motivation and engagement, which are important indicators that the psychological foundations for deeper learning are in place. 

I know because there are studies published in peer reviewed journals that report those results, and I conducted one of those studies (published in the journal Other Education in 2013). 

The types of schools are democratic schools, home school resource centers, and some schools that claim to support deeper learning. 

These types of schools operate in very different ways from each other, and from mainstream schools, too. 

(There may be other kinds of schools which maintain motivation and engagement, but I have yet to see peer-reviewed studies published on them.) 

These schools do not use the behaviorist assumptions that we know are impractical to apply to human children. 

None of them have controlled breeding programs, none of them take complete control of the 24/7 living conditions of the children, and none of them provide one-on-one behavioral shaping as a means of preparing them for their schooling. 

The behaviorist assumptions that they use to good effect consist of taking control of the living conditions at school, paying attention to preferences, and utilizing spontaneous behaviors for educational purposes. 

You can learn more about those kinds of schools in my book Schooling for Holistic Equity. 

Conclusion

Behaviorism in education is not the bogeyman that some folks think it is.

The problem with the way behaviorism is applied in schools is that they failed to bring with the term the key assumptions that behavioral scientists use.

Specifically, making sure that the living conditions of the school are nurturing to children, taking children’s preferences into account, and utilizing children’s spontaneous behaviors for educational purposes. 

The applications of so-called “behaviorism” in schools are over-simplified reward and punishment systems that fail to take into account what science has revealed about what truly motivates humans. 

P.S. If you would like to apply the science properly you can learn about the distinction between leadership and management by clicking here.

This article was printed from HolisticEquity.com