Exploring Applications of Operant Conditioning

So this week we're talking about different applications in operant conditioning. This is module 9 of the learning and behavior class. So the applications of operant conditioning are housed in a particular field or science called ABA or applied behavior analysis. And so what I want to do is I want to show you just a few of the applications and then your text will tell you a little bit more about that as well. So let's start with education. Here's a few different applications that are based on the science of behavior, applied behavior analysis, or operant conditioning. Personalized systems of instruction, programmed instruction, and precision teaching. So with personalized systems of instruction, that was based on Fred Keller's work. He had done a lot of work and it culminated in this study in 1968, or a description in 1968, called Goodbye Teacher in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. And what the article was saying was not get rid of teachers. We definitely need teachers to implement this, but the way that teaching had been done in the past may no longer be necessary. And so this was called personalized systems of instruction, or sometimes it's also called the Keller Plan. This plan is still very popular in instructional design and it's become more popular with web-based content. Although there wasn't the web back then, the internet back then, it was perfectly matched to the types of things that the internet could do. So some keys of personalized systems of instruction. One is that there's a go at your own pace. So the individual can keep moving forward. as long as they're progressing and they weren't restricted by a particular time requirement. There's also a unit perfection requirement. So in order to advance, you wanted perfection. So you didn't want an 80% correct or a 90%. You want a 100% correct before the individual would advance. And these were based on the written word. So it's kind of like your textbook, your test. book moves along, it gives you little bits of information, and then it asks you questions or has you respond to it. Another method that's based around an analysis of behavior is referred to as direct instruction. Now, direct instruction sounds like a generic term, but it's really a specific term referring to a specific type of instruction. And when you see literature on education, you know you're looking at direct instruction that I'm talking about here when it's capitalized. Sometimes people refer to direct instruction as just the instruction that you provide to students. But this is specific. It included scripted lessons. It directly told the students what to do. So it didn't really leave much to students having to figure anything out. It wanted to be very precise and prescriptive, and it wanted to create what they called faultless learning. Faultless learning is where you design a lesson so that it eliminates the chance for the learner to make mistakes. That's why it's called faultless. So this is a little bit different than what we call discovery learning, where the individuals are really more guided on their own. But it... was found to be extremely effective. In fact, there was one of the biggest educational studies ever conceived and implemented called Project Follow-Through. Project Follow-Through was a federally funded project, and what it did is it took the top people in education, had them design different programs, and then implement those programs across the United States. It's involved hundreds of thousands of students, many schools, and what was really cool about it is that the people who had different theories about learning were able to design their own programs and set up their own trainings for the different sites. And the programs focused around a few different models. We had models that were cognitively oriented. Models that were creatively oriented. There were some models that were based on self-esteem. There were some models based on reinforcing a behavior alone. And then there was direct instruction. And what they found from those results was that direct instruction outperformed every other model that was out there. In fact, direct instruction not only produced bigger academic performance gains, that is better readers and ability to do math, it also produced better outcomes on cognitive measures, so measures of cognitive processing. or something like an IQ test. What I always found really interesting though is that it even produced the best effective outcomes. Effective means emotional, so self-esteem, how people feel about their competence level, how good they feel about school and instruction. And it actually produced the best outcomes. And in fact, it produced better outcomes than the models that were built on self-esteem. And if you think about it, it's not really surprising. You know, people want to feel good about doing good, and they know when they're not doing good, even when somebody's telling them that they are. And so this actually made students perform well, and they knew it, so it had better effective outcomes. Another methodology from behavior analysis or operant conditioning was precision teaching. And this was developed by Ogden Linsley, who's a student of Skinner. And the key was that they focused on the frequency of response or the speed of response, frequency being how much within a certain amount of time. So in this paradigm, it focuses a lot on measures like How many concepts can somebody name in one minute? How many words can you read in one minute? And it was trying to branch out from the vagueness of percent accurate scores, which is what we typically see in education. So it really looked at frequency and speed of response. One of the biggest studies that was used in precision teaching was the Sacajawea Project in the Native American Indian school system. And it involved 153,000 students, 8,000 teachers. And what they found was that through just 10 minutes a day, they were able to increase academic performance scores by 20 to 40 percentile points. They found that the kids had greater retention of the information, greater generalization and adaptation of the information. So not only were they, say, reading better or doing math, problems better, they're able to use those skills and apply them to a wider variety of situations. So education is human behavior. Let's talk about our non-human animals, animal behavior. Operant conditioning has been used quite frequently in animal behavior. It's been used with reintroduction programs, handling. performance, human benefiting behavior, and it really is where a lot of clicker training started. Now, the interesting thing about clicker training is it started with animals. People started using it with humans and have achieved some pretty surprisingly good results. So just one study here that looked at promotion of species typical behavior, and what they're looking at were otters that were in zoos. And in natural environment, otters use slides to slide down into a river. And so we want animals to engage in species typical behavior, not just for reintroduction purposes, but even for satisfaction purposes. Animals and people tend to be more happy. when they're engaging in behaviors and accomplishing outcomes that the species has evolved to accomplish. So they did this by creating these slides, and the slides were used, but the use was really low. So they started reinforcing it with two fish. They made sure that two fish were available at the end of the slide, and what they saw was that otters started using the slides more frequently. So they're engaging in more behavior. they are engaging in species typical behavior. So they're more active and likely having a more satisfying existence. So another promotion of species typical behavior was the socialization of gorillas. Animals in zoos have often been really isolated to the extent that they really can't interact with other animals and certainly in the wild not only can they not socialize well but that poor socialization may result in a bad effect, dangerous effect for themselves. So Looking at this one particular gorilla that was caught at age two and was alone for 27 years. So they wanted to reintroduce it socially. So they started by just allowing Willie to have visual and olfactory smell contact. Then they allowed physical contact through mesh. Then they introduced to females. a neutral area and then final introduction to social environment. So they're able to use these successive approximations to introduce the gorilla to where he could now engage after 27 years in a more social environment. Also plenty of research on animal handling. Here's one study where they looked at some horses that they were having difficulty to train to load onto a trailer. And so they trained them to independently get on the trailer with a simple command. And they did it using clicks as reinforcers. So this is clicker training where you do a click and you pair it with some reinforcer. So this was food. So they'd click and give food, click and give food. You do that enough and that click becomes conditioned as its own reinforcer. They also shaped touching nose to a cloth. Then they could lead the horse with the cloth. until they could then fade that away and eventually get to where the horse would go on the trailer with a simple command. Another study, they looked at a baboon who had self-injurious behavior, lip-biting behavior, becoming dangerous. You know, it could get infected. It would prevent some feeding, so have some difficulty there. And so what they did was they did a functional analysis of the lip biting. They set up different conditions to figure out what the reinforcer was. And what they found through that analysis was that the behavior seemed to be functioning for attention as a reinforcer. So what they did was they started trying to eliminate attention for that behavior, but more importantly, they taught a new behavior that would result in attention. So they did. differential reinforcement of an alternative behavior, DRA. And the other behavior they used was lip smacking. So it was similar in the topography, the way the behavior looked, but key is that they made sure that it resulted in attention. And what you see here on the graph is take note of two different pathways of this data. One has triangles, one has circles. The triangles are the bad behavior, self-injurious. Circles are good. So at first... They found that attention was given for the self-injurious behavior, SIB, and so that behavior was high. That was kind of their baseline. Then they flipped that and they put attention for the problem behavior on extinction, meaning they didn't give it attention. But they did start giving attention when Olive would engage in lip smacking, and you see that data flip. So it went from the bad behavior being high to the good behavior being high. They remove that intervention and they do that to make sure that there wasn't something else going on that improved the behavior, that it was actually the intervention. And sure enough, when they removed it, behavior went back down. They re-implemented it and the good behavior went up and that problem behavior went down again. So the final one I'm going to talk about in this introduction is organizational behavior management. So organizational behavior management is a separate field. Some of you might be familiar with industrial and organizational psychology. So with that, it kind of uses lots of different theories from psychology. But with organizational behavior management, it focuses only on the ones that have a strong evidence-based and, for the most part, are based on operant learning. So... Organizational behavior management has a few key principles. that you can see kind of fit within that operant paradigm. The big principle is performance analysis. We're going to measure behaviors and outputs. So we're going to measure the behaviors and the outputs that we want. Then we're going to try to manipulate the behavior. And manipulate just means we're going to work with the people to change the behavior in small ways. And then measure the outputs again and see if it made a difference. The second principle though is specificity. And this is that the term should be measurable, observable, and objective. So everything that we're talking about with behavior in an organizational behavior management paradigm needs to be operationalized really well. And that includes different signals that might cue the behavior, might call antecedents, and the behaviors themselves. So think about your behavior project. I mean you can see the similarity here. We're basically doing OBM with ourselves when we're doing this behavior project. Three is measurement. We're going to measure the behavior and that measurement is going to be measured based on our expectations, what we want to see. And we're going to look at a comparison of where our behavior is versus where we would like it to be. Finally, with organizational behavior management, there's going to be some feedback. Feedback is given quickly and it allows for sufficient information for self-correction. So it's not good enough just to get feedback to show that you were incorrect or that you did it wrong. You want to have some information that tells you, well, how do I correct this in the future so that that doesn't happen again? And then we have principle five, and that principle is positive consequences. Obviously, that fits within an operant paradigm. because positive consequences are going to be aligned to what we call reinforcement. And those positive consequences should be immediate. There should be an immediacy, but there should also be a contingency, meaning that those positive consequences are consequences of a specific behavior. So a good job or a completion of a task or any other kind of reinforcer is only going to happen when the behavior happens in the right way. So we have both the immediacy and the contingency. There are a couple of major organizations that help major corporations that you've probably heard of. Corporations that you've heard of like Boeing, Coke, Google. These big corporations that utilize different companies. that use organizational behavior management, which is based on behavior analysis and operant conditioning. So I want to show you a couple of videos of those programs to give you an idea of what they look like. The first one is Aubrey Daniels International, and this is a really major corporation consulting firm that deals with behavior using behavior analysis. Okay, picture your workplace. Maybe it's an office tower, a factory floor, or some amazing unconventional environment. You know that improvements can be made to transform your organization for the better. But where do you begin? Well, maybe you have a manager like Kate. She knows it's her responsibility to lead her team towards success. But how can she be an effective leader if her workplace is giving her mixed messages about the company's strategic direction and her daily priorities? Or how about someone like Ron? As a frontline employee, he's challenged to follow the defined process when it's not always the best or easiest way to get his work done. And maybe if you look around your organization, you see a culture that works hard but typically only hears about what they've done wrong, leaving employees feeling unappreciated or unnoticed. You know, with so many variables at play in the workplace, it's understandable when organizational systems management practices and cultures unintentionally reinforce the wrong behavior or ignore the behavior that separates average companies from great ones. At Aubrey Daniels International we work with you to align your systems practices and work environments to ensure that your organization reaches its full potential. ADI can help bring out the best in Kate and Ron and they can help you bring out the best for your organization. So contact us today to find out how you too can transform your workplace. All right, so another major... organization in this field is called Six Boxes. And so this is just one of their videos. They have a lot of little cool videos. ADI does as well. But this one talks about coaching and how they go about coaching staff, administrators, and employees in different organizations. At the Performance Thinking Network, we teach coaching with a focus on what we call accomplishments or work outputs. Now many years ago our late mentor Tom Gilbert emphasized the fact that in organizational performance it's accomplishments that are valuable, whereas behavior, the behavior needed to produce those accomplishments, is costly. It costs us to support and develop behavior in order to produce valuable contributions or accomplishments. And so we take that very much to heart. When we have coaching conversations with people, we begin by defining the accomplishments or the contributions that they make in their jobs to the organization, or possibly things that they would like to make or that we need them to make. Once we define those accomplishments, we then can have a conversation about the behavior needed to produce those, and we can go about that conversation in lots of ways, which is first identifying the level of detail that people need to know about behavior. then possibly pointing to people who are exemplary performers in that area or coaching people based on what we know they need to do to produce the output But the accomplishment is the focus and this enables us to be very specific It also enables us to connect people's performance up to the value that they deliver to their organization's results so whether those results are customer satisfaction or safety or revenue or employee satisfaction or market share Whatever those organization level results are, when you define the accomplishments of people and show people how those accomplishments contribute to organizational results, you will have a more aligned and a more engaged employee. All right. So that's it for our introduction into this topic. Go and read that text and you're going to find out even more things that are happening. in the operant behavior field. We'll see you soon.

So let's start with education. Here's a few different applications that are based on the science of behavior, applied behavior analysis, or operant conditioning. Personalized systems of instruction, programmed instruction, and precision teaching.

So with personalized systems of instruction, that was based on Fred Keller's work. He had done a lot of work and it culminated in this study in 1968, or a description in 1968, called Goodbye Teacher in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. And what the article was saying was not get rid of teachers.

We definitely need teachers to implement this, but the way that teaching had been done in the past may no longer be necessary. And so this was called personalized systems of instruction, or sometimes it's also called the Keller Plan. This plan is still very popular in instructional design and it's become more popular with web-based content. Although there wasn't the web back then, the internet back then, it was perfectly matched to the types of things that the internet could do.

So some keys of personalized systems of instruction. One is that there's a go at your own pace. So the individual can keep moving forward. as long as they're progressing and they weren't restricted by a particular time requirement. There's also a unit perfection requirement.

So in order to advance, you wanted perfection. So you didn't want an 80% correct or a 90%. You want a 100% correct before the individual would advance.

And these were based on the written word. So it's kind of like your textbook, your test. book moves along, it gives you little bits of information, and then it asks you questions or has you respond to it.

Another method that's based around an analysis of behavior is referred to as direct instruction. Now, direct instruction sounds like a generic term, but it's really a specific term referring to a specific type of instruction. And when you see literature on education, you know you're looking at direct instruction that I'm talking about here when it's capitalized.

Sometimes people refer to direct instruction as just the instruction that you provide to students. But this is specific. It included scripted lessons.

It directly told the students what to do. So it didn't really leave much to students having to figure anything out. It wanted to be very precise and prescriptive, and it wanted to create what they called faultless learning.

Faultless learning is where you design a lesson so that it eliminates the chance for the learner to make mistakes. That's why it's called faultless. So this is a little bit different than what we call discovery learning, where the individuals are really more guided on their own. But it...

was found to be extremely effective. In fact, there was one of the biggest educational studies ever conceived and implemented called Project Follow-Through. Project Follow-Through was a federally funded project, and what it did is it took the top people in education, had them design different programs, and then implement those programs across the United States.

It's involved hundreds of thousands of students, many schools, and what was really cool about it is that the people who had different theories about learning were able to design their own programs and set up their own trainings for the different sites. And the programs focused around a few different models. We had models that were cognitively oriented.

Models that were creatively oriented. There were some models that were based on self-esteem. There were some models based on reinforcing a behavior alone. And then there was direct instruction. And what they found from those results was that direct instruction outperformed every other model that was out there.

In fact, direct instruction not only produced bigger academic performance gains, that is better readers and ability to do math, it also produced better outcomes on cognitive measures, so measures of cognitive processing. or something like an IQ test. What I always found really interesting though is that it even produced the best effective outcomes. Effective means emotional, so self-esteem, how people feel about their competence level, how good they feel about school and instruction. And it actually produced the best outcomes.

And in fact, it produced better outcomes than the models that were built on self-esteem. And if you think about it, it's not really surprising. You know, people want to feel good about doing good, and they know when they're not doing good, even when somebody's telling them that they are.

And so this actually made students perform well, and they knew it, so it had better effective outcomes. Another methodology from behavior analysis or operant conditioning was precision teaching. And this was developed by Ogden Linsley, who's a student of Skinner.

And the key was that they focused on the frequency of response or the speed of response, frequency being how much within a certain amount of time. So in this paradigm, it focuses a lot on measures like How many concepts can somebody name in one minute? How many words can you read in one minute? And it was trying to branch out from the vagueness of percent accurate scores, which is what we typically see in education. So it really looked at frequency and speed of response.

One of the biggest studies that was used in precision teaching was the Sacajawea Project in the Native American Indian school system. And it involved 153,000 students, 8,000 teachers. And what they found was that through just 10 minutes a day, they were able to increase academic performance scores by 20 to 40 percentile points. They found that the kids had greater retention of the information, greater generalization and adaptation of the information.

So not only were they, say, reading better or doing math, problems better, they're able to use those skills and apply them to a wider variety of situations. So education is human behavior. Let's talk about our non-human animals, animal behavior. Operant conditioning has been used quite frequently in animal behavior.

It's been used with reintroduction programs, handling. performance, human benefiting behavior, and it really is where a lot of clicker training started. Now, the interesting thing about clicker training is it started with animals. People started using it with humans and have achieved some pretty surprisingly good results. So just one study here that looked at promotion of species typical behavior, and what they're looking at were otters that were in zoos.

And in natural environment, otters use slides to slide down into a river. And so we want animals to engage in species typical behavior, not just for reintroduction purposes, but even for satisfaction purposes. Animals and people tend to be more happy.

when they're engaging in behaviors and accomplishing outcomes that the species has evolved to accomplish. So they did this by creating these slides, and the slides were used, but the use was really low. So they started reinforcing it with two fish.

They made sure that two fish were available at the end of the slide, and what they saw was that otters started using the slides more frequently. So they're engaging in more behavior. they are engaging in species typical behavior. So they're more active and likely having a more satisfying existence. So another promotion of species typical behavior was the socialization of gorillas.

Animals in zoos have often been really isolated to the extent that they really can't interact with other animals and certainly in the wild not only can they not socialize well but that poor socialization may result in a bad effect, dangerous effect for themselves. So Looking at this one particular gorilla that was caught at age two and was alone for 27 years. So they wanted to reintroduce it socially. So they started by just allowing Willie to have visual and olfactory smell contact. Then they allowed physical contact through mesh.

Then they introduced to females. a neutral area and then final introduction to social environment. So they're able to use these successive approximations to introduce the gorilla to where he could now engage after 27 years in a more social environment.

Also plenty of research on animal handling. Here's one study where they looked at some horses that they were having difficulty to train to load onto a trailer. And so they trained them to independently get on the trailer with a simple command.

And they did it using clicks as reinforcers. So this is clicker training where you do a click and you pair it with some reinforcer. So this was food. So they'd click and give food, click and give food. You do that enough and that click becomes conditioned as its own reinforcer.

They also shaped touching nose to a cloth. Then they could lead the horse with the cloth. until they could then fade that away and eventually get to where the horse would go on the trailer with a simple command.

Another study, they looked at a baboon who had self-injurious behavior, lip-biting behavior, becoming dangerous. You know, it could get infected. It would prevent some feeding, so have some difficulty there. And so what they did was they did a functional analysis of the lip biting. They set up different conditions to figure out what the reinforcer was.

And what they found through that analysis was that the behavior seemed to be functioning for attention as a reinforcer. So what they did was they started trying to eliminate attention for that behavior, but more importantly, they taught a new behavior that would result in attention. So they did.

differential reinforcement of an alternative behavior, DRA. And the other behavior they used was lip smacking. So it was similar in the topography, the way the behavior looked, but key is that they made sure that it resulted in attention.

And what you see here on the graph is take note of two different pathways of this data. One has triangles, one has circles. The triangles are the bad behavior, self-injurious.

Circles are good. So at first... They found that attention was given for the self-injurious behavior, SIB, and so that behavior was high. That was kind of their baseline. Then they flipped that and they put attention for the problem behavior on extinction, meaning they didn't give it attention.

But they did start giving attention when Olive would engage in lip smacking, and you see that data flip. So it went from the bad behavior being high to the good behavior being high. They remove that intervention and they do that to make sure that there wasn't something else going on that improved the behavior, that it was actually the intervention. And sure enough, when they removed it, behavior went back down. They re-implemented it and the good behavior went up and that problem behavior went down again.

So the final one I'm going to talk about in this introduction is organizational behavior management. So organizational behavior management is a separate field. Some of you might be familiar with industrial and organizational psychology. So with that, it kind of uses lots of different theories from psychology. But with organizational behavior management, it focuses only on the ones that have a strong evidence-based and, for the most part, are based on operant learning.

So... Organizational behavior management has a few key principles. that you can see kind of fit within that operant paradigm. The big principle is performance analysis. We're going to measure behaviors and outputs.

So we're going to measure the behaviors and the outputs that we want. Then we're going to try to manipulate the behavior. And manipulate just means we're going to work with the people to change the behavior in small ways.

And then measure the outputs again and see if it made a difference. The second principle though is specificity. And this is that the term should be measurable, observable, and objective. So everything that we're talking about with behavior in an organizational behavior management paradigm needs to be operationalized really well.

And that includes different signals that might cue the behavior, might call antecedents, and the behaviors themselves. So think about your behavior project. I mean you can see the similarity here.

We're basically doing OBM with ourselves when we're doing this behavior project. Three is measurement. We're going to measure the behavior and that measurement is going to be measured based on our expectations, what we want to see.

And we're going to look at a comparison of where our behavior is versus where we would like it to be. Finally, with organizational behavior management, there's going to be some feedback. Feedback is given quickly and it allows for sufficient information for self-correction.

So it's not good enough just to get feedback to show that you were incorrect or that you did it wrong. You want to have some information that tells you, well, how do I correct this in the future so that that doesn't happen again? And then we have principle five, and that principle is positive consequences. Obviously, that fits within an operant paradigm.

because positive consequences are going to be aligned to what we call reinforcement. And those positive consequences should be immediate. There should be an immediacy, but there should also be a contingency, meaning that those positive consequences are consequences of a specific behavior.

So a good job or a completion of a task or any other kind of reinforcer is only going to happen when the behavior happens in the right way. So we have both the immediacy and the contingency. There are a couple of major organizations that help major corporations that you've probably heard of. Corporations that you've heard of like Boeing, Coke, Google.

These big corporations that utilize different companies. that use organizational behavior management, which is based on behavior analysis and operant conditioning. So I want to show you a couple of videos of those programs to give you an idea of what they look like. The first one is Aubrey Daniels International, and this is a really major corporation consulting firm that deals with behavior using behavior analysis.

Okay, picture your workplace. Maybe it's an office tower, a factory floor, or some amazing unconventional environment. You know that improvements can be made to transform your organization for the better. But where do you begin?

Well, maybe you have a manager like Kate. She knows it's her responsibility to lead her team towards success. But how can she be an effective leader if her workplace is giving her mixed messages about the company's strategic direction and her daily priorities?

Or how about someone like Ron? As a frontline employee, he's challenged to follow the defined process when it's not always the best or easiest way to get his work done. And maybe if you look around your organization, you see a culture that works hard but typically only hears about what they've done wrong, leaving employees feeling unappreciated or unnoticed. You know, with so many variables at play in the workplace, it's understandable when organizational systems management practices and cultures unintentionally reinforce the wrong behavior or ignore the behavior that separates average companies from great ones. At Aubrey Daniels International we work with you to align your systems practices and work environments to ensure that your organization reaches its full potential.

ADI can help bring out the best in Kate and Ron and they can help you bring out the best for your organization. So contact us today to find out how you too can transform your workplace. All right, so another major...

organization in this field is called Six Boxes. And so this is just one of their videos. They have a lot of little cool videos. ADI does as well.

But this one talks about coaching and how they go about coaching staff, administrators, and employees in different organizations. At the Performance Thinking Network, we teach coaching with a focus on what we call accomplishments or work outputs. Now many years ago our late mentor Tom Gilbert emphasized the fact that in organizational performance it's accomplishments that are valuable, whereas behavior, the behavior needed to produce those accomplishments, is costly.

It costs us to support and develop behavior in order to produce valuable contributions or accomplishments. And so we take that very much to heart. When we have coaching conversations with people, we begin by defining the accomplishments or the contributions that they make in their jobs to the organization, or possibly things that they would like to make or that we need them to make.

Once we define those accomplishments, we then can have a conversation about the behavior needed to produce those, and we can go about that conversation in lots of ways, which is first identifying the level of detail that people need to know about behavior. then possibly pointing to people who are exemplary performers in that area or coaching people based on what we know they need to do to produce the output But the accomplishment is the focus and this enables us to be very specific It also enables us to connect people's performance up to the value that they deliver to their organization's results so whether those results are customer satisfaction or safety or revenue or employee satisfaction or market share Whatever those organization level results are, when you define the accomplishments of people and show people how those accomplishments contribute to organizational results, you will have a more aligned and a more engaged employee. All right. So that's it for our introduction into this topic.

Go and read that text and you're going to find out even more things that are happening. in the operant behavior field. We'll see you soon.

Transcript for:Exploring Applications of Operant Conditioning

Transcript for:
Exploring Applications of Operant Conditioning