Question

A mother is trying to increase the amount of peas that her two children eat. She uses a sticker chart to monitor the amount of peas they are consuming and rewards them based on the number of stickers they have earned at the end of the week. The mother has found that this works for one child, but not the other.3. Identify the method of reinforcement being used.4. Explain possible reasons for this method working for one child but not the other.

Answer 1

The method of reinforcement that the mother is using is called positive reinforcement. This means that a stimulus is added to the enviornment that brings about an increase in a preceeding response. In this case the stimulus addded is the reward they are given at the end of the week based of the stickers they earn and the environment its added into is that where they are given stickers for the peas that they eat and the response excpected is that they eat their peas for the end of the week reward.

Sometimes the same kind of reinforcement does not work on two individuals as each person is different in their personality and they prefer to be motivated in a different way. Usually this kind of reinforcement between children can cause competition among them to see who gets the reward and this kind of competitive attitude would not be like by the other child therefore he would have just plainly given up right at the beginning. Also this method of positive reinforcement can be quite unmotivating on the long period of time and hence he has stopped responding to it. HE ight just be plain bored of eating eating peas that the reward is not good enough for him.