Discuss a question, confusion, or something you wonder about after reading the chapter (when commenting, look for these questions and answer them)
· I have trouble with the concepts like positive punishment. I know that you are trying to do something positive, but it comes out as a punishment. The title is just somewhat confusing.
A behaviorism learning theorist believes that everything can be learned through paired associations. CAN everything be learned in this way? Why or why not?
Not everything can be learned through paired associations. Some students think abstractly and do not always see the pairs as being associated. You need to break things down and still describe everything. It may help to present possible pairs to associate together for memory minders. Some pairs can confuse students.
(I don’t really feel like the module gave us the answers for these questions this time.
I agree that the words "punishment" and "negative" are misleading, because we associate certain feelings with those words (bad feelings, most often). I too find the concept of positive punishment to be contradictory. I try to think of it like this: when a child behaves in some way, you either want to encourage that behavior or discourage it. So, to encourage the behavior, you would either engage in positive reinforcement (the adding of a stimulus to increase a behavior, such as giving candy as a reward for doing chores) or negative reinforcement (the taking away of a stimulus to increase a certain behavior/response, such as taking away music so as to focus better when studying). In order to decrease the frequency of a child's behavior (if it's not a good behavior) then you engage in either positive or negative punishment. This makes sense right, you want to punish the child in some way for the bad behavior and you want to decrease the likelihood of that behavior. For example, you would engage in positive punishment in order to decrease a certain behavior (by making the outcome of that behavior/punishment unpleasant). So, if a mother is yelling at her child who just ran into the street, the child will stop the running in order to stop the yelling. The child associates the yelling with punishment. Negative punishment involves taking away something that is positive/good for the child so you can decrease the occurrence of that behavior. For example, to punish a child for poor grades, you would take away their video games, in hopes that they would increase their grades (and that bad behavior of receiving poor grades would end).
ReplyDeletePositive punishment sounds very contridictory in nature, but in actuality, is a very good method to use on negative actions. For example, if a child says or does something that their parent does not approve of, the parent might send the child to a time out. Since the child does not like to sit by themselves in time out, they will learn that whenever they say the inappropriate word or phrase, they will be sent to a time out again. This is positive in consequence because the child will most likely never commit the negative action again, fearing that the next time they do something wrong, they will be lonely in the corner :( This method works very well for children that have continuous problems in disciplinary actions.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you guys with what you have said so far, this whole positive punishment reminds me of when my mom used to wash my mouth with a bar of soap for saying bad words. That wasn't a good experience for me and on the long run I think I learned my lesson, even though I may throw out a few cuss words here and there when I'm with my friends, I tend to be really careful to say anything bad when I'm around my mom for I still have negative memories lol
ReplyDeleteThe 'positive' and 'negative' refers to the stimulus being introduced. I know it's tricky. Positive means that you're ADDING something and negative means you're REMOVING something.
ReplyDeleteThe questions are meant to make you think outside the chapter. Think about what might be true given what you know about behaviorism. Think critically and make a claim (with support).
Your response is a little unclear and I'd like you to be more specific next time.... I think you're saying that not everyone associates the same meaning to a new concept, and that's true, it is a downside of behaviorism. But, you also claim that 'you need to break things down'. DO you always need to break things down? Can you teach something in its more complex form and NOT break it down further?