Article Nieforth LO, Miller EA, MacDermid Wadsworth S, O’Haire ME. Posttraumatic stress disorder service dogs and the wellbeing of veteran families. Eur J Psychotraumatol. 2022

Ms. Fisher is planning for her upcoming year as a kindergarten teacher. Over the summer, she read a book on incorporating operant conditioning into her classroom management plan. Her goal is to improve student behavior so that more time can be spent on learning activities. She decides to apply two different operant conditioning methods to each kindergarten class she teaches each day. The first method includes rewarding students’ good behavior with tokens they can use to “purchase” small prizes. The second method rewards students’ good behavior with extra minutes of recess time.
Ms. Fisher believes that the extra minutes of recess will be more effective in improving student behavior than the tokens. She uses these reward methods for a month and records the percentage of students who earn the rewards for a series of different behaviors. The graph below shows the percentages of students who earned rewards in each of Ms. Fisher’s classes:
Part A
Answer the following questions regarding Ms. Fisher’s research methods.
Identify Ms. Fisher’s hypothesis in this study.
Identify the operational definition for the dependent variable.
Explain why this study is not a naturalistic observation.
Identify one flaw in Ms. Fisher’s methodology.
Part B
Explain how each of the following might have played a role in the children’s behavior.
Positive reinforcement
Negative punishment
Hippocampus