Teaching Nonprofessionals Three Techniques to Modify Children's Behavior

Abstract

The relative effectiveness of video-taped lecturing, video-taped modeling or a combination of lecturing and modeling was compared in teaching nonprofessionals to correctly choose the behavioral categories of “praise” (verbal reinforcement), “ignore” (extinction), and “timeout.” All three teaching techniques were significantly more effective in teaching these categories than the no-treatment control group (ns = 17). While no significant over-all differences were found between the three training methods, the subjects trained with both lecturing and modeling emitted the fewest errors. Furthermore, the no-training control subjects showed a tendency to employ timeout for behaviors which should be reinforced and for behaviors which should be extinguished. Suggestions for future research and possible applications of the modeling procedure were discussed.