A review of the evidence bearing on explanations of how positive and negative evaluations of a person, by others, or by himself, come to function as positive and negative reinforcers for him may be found in Hill,WinfredF.“Sources of Evaluative Reinforcement”Psychological Bulletin, 69, 2, 1968, 132–46.
2.
McNeilJohn. “An Experimental Effort to Improve Instruction Through Visual Feedback”. Journal of Educational Research, 55, March 1962, 283–5, describes an attempt to overcome the problem of delayed feedback by the use of a four-colour light to give teacher trainees immediate knowledge of selected effects of their teaching on pupils. He concludes that the treatment did not significantly increase the frequency of teaching behaviour judged to be appropriate.
3.
An attempt to give direct, detailed and immediate reinforcement of their teaching performance can be provided for trainees by the videotaping of lesson segments. See, for example, the account of “microteaching” at Stanford University in the Journal of Teacher Education, 18, 1967, 389–93.
4.
ClarkeA. M.McKenzieI.“The Application of Learning Theory to Pupil Management: Some Suggested Procedures”. Australian Journal of Education, 11, 21967, 143–4. This article, which applies the concepts of operant conditioning to classroom management, has stimulated a number of ideas outlined in this paper.
5.
ClarkeA. M.McKenzieI.op. cit., 146–7, who make the point with reference to teaching pupils desirable behaviour.
6.
The detailed argument describing the establishment of a chain follows the argument ofHollandJ. G.SkinnerB. F.The Analysis of Behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961, particularly pages 137–75.
7.
It is important to note that reinforcement of trainees by a supervisor is filtered through the perceptions and cognitions of the trainee and that these transform and ameliorate its effect. It is suggested by Martin Maehr in “Some Limitations of Reinforcement Theory to Education”, School and Society, 96, 1968, 108–110, that simple reinforcement principles do not apply in many learning situations with human subjects. He proposes that “being right” is inadequate as a definition of reinforcement, and that it should be framed in terms of some theory of self-regard, e.g. feedback that tells an individual not only what he thinks he is, but that he is becoming what he wants to be in a particular competence area.
