B.F. Skinner Essay

By giving a reward, such as dessert or pocket money to the child when completing homework, it was more likely that this behaviour would be repeated and strengthened. Another thing is the reward system in schools nowadays for good behaviour, where you would receive a star or something similar for behaving the desired way in the classroom. What Skinner showed was that all kinds of behaviours can be shaped and built step by step.

Slater describes how Skinner expanded on Pavlov’s findings about classical conditioning, which showed how a reflex could be conditioned to happen in response to a different stimulus (Slater 10). Skinner felt that it wasn’t just reflexes that could be conditioned but other behaviors as well. He studied animal’s behaviors after they were given a reward or consequence. His famous box studies involved him training rats to be rewarded with food in fixed-ratio schedules,

In chapter 1, Opening Skinner’s Box, Slater talks about a psychologist named B. F. Skinner. Skinner shows us how easily operant conditioning can be done. He believed that you have a better outcome if you study observable behavior instead of studying mental events. Skinner’s work focused on operant conditioning. People and animals were the subjects of his studies.

Zimmerman and Carla Copenhaven. 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2007. 413 – 18. Print.

Psychologist, born in Susquhanna, Pa. He studied at Harvard, teaching there (1931-6, 1947-74). A leading behaviorist, he is a proponent of operant conditioning, and the inventor of the Skinner box for facilitating experimental observations.

Skinner’s reinforcement experiments conducted on rats showed the principles of operant conditioning. While working with rats, Skinner would place them in a Skinner box with a lever attached to a feeding tube. After multiple trials, rats learned the connection between the lever and food, and started to spend more time in the box procuring food than performing any other action. He used positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement to produce or inhibit specific target behaviors. Therefore, if a specific behavior is reinforced then the probability of that behavior occurring again is increased. Based on Skinner’s view, this theory can be applied to learning because learning is nothing more than a change in behavior. Operant conditioning encourages positive reinforcement, which can be applied in the classroom environment to get the good behavior you want and need from students. One of the ways of reinforcing a student’s behavior is through praise. Also teachers can build operant conditioning techniques into their lesson plans to teach children possible skills as well as good behaviors. For example: to give a smiley face, or motivational stamps to encourage children to perform correctly and encourage them to repeat such action again.

“The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone,” stated B. F. Skinner (Brainy, 2014). This is a quote that is very popular and was a prime description of those Skinners experiments were meant to prove along with it being a saying that many people in the psychology world followed. Burrhus Fredrick Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in the small town Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. Skinners father was a lawyer while his mother was a stay at home mom to take care of him and his younger brother. As a boy, he enjoyed creating a variety of gadgets and coming up with convincing ideas that was his step in stone later on when he go into psychological studies. After graduating from Hamilton College in 1926, Skinner was very undecided on what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. Skinner tried to begin a career as a writer and author, but soon realized he was not making any progress; he decided to pursue psychology at Harvard University. After graduating from Harvard, he continued to work there for the rest of his career. After a year of fighting leukemia, Skinner died on August 18,1990. Skinner left a remarkable imprint on the psychology world; by the time he died Skinner was named to be the utmost influential psychologist in the 29th century, along with publishing a considerable amount of books and articles (Zorn, 2014).

Skinner believed that behaviour is shaped and maintained by a reinforcing stimulus and that schedules of reinforcement are important factors in the learning process. There are many situations in the classroom where a behaviourist approach is likely to work well. For example, when I teach, I have started to pick out students who are making the right choices throughout the lesson. I call attention to the student who is doing the right thing and use verbal praise, which is quite an effective way to let other students realise what the expected learning behaviour is. The Year 6 students in the class are aware of the school’s reward system; ten credits lead to one merit, which is recorded in their merit book. They are also aware that bad behaviour in the class or on the playground will be followed by negative consequences. To warn against unwanted behaviour, I have seen teachers use negative reinforcers such as verbal warnings, timeouts and losing privileges.

Skinner’s theory observes individuals from the point of view of the behavior that they demonstrate. The key weakness of this theory is its attempt to explain the behaviors of an individual solely through visible phenomena. Critics sometimes accuse behaviorists of denying that ideas and thoughts exist (Jensen & Burgess, 1997). The major opposition that behaviorists face is that behavior of a person cannot be understood without including the mental activity of the individual. Critics have accused behaviorists of focusing only on behavior and ignoring the role of physiology, neuroscience, and genetics (Weiss & Rosales-Ruiz, 2014). Sometimes the reactions that people demonstrate have are not related their experience and therefore they have another

One of the most prominent and influential psychologists of the twentieth century, B.F. Skinner was known as a behavioral psychologist, philosopher of science, and an educational innovator. Throughout his life he did experimental work with animals to discover how patterns of behavior are learned. His initial work was primarily conducted with animals, and later in life he started to work with humans and apply his learning from his pigeon studies to human behavior. He focused on the individual and wrote about how to restructure social systems to improve the quality of life.

The impacts that B. F. Skinner made were world changing. Imagine this: a world with no reinforcement. Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcements and all forms of punishment might not seem like a big deal, but they are used everywhere,

He also read about animals. He collected toads, lizards, and snakes. He trained pigeons to do tricks after he saw them performing one year at a fair. Training the pigeons probably was where he got his ideas of operant conditioning. He attended Susquehanna High School just like his mother and father. In his graduating class there were only eight people including him. He was a very intellectual person. He reported that he really enjoyed school. Over the four years in high school Skinner became good at math and reading Latin, but was no good at science. He was always performing physical and chemical experiments while he was at home. His father was a book collector. Skinner always had a good library of books around his house. Skinner recalled the little collection of applied psychology journals that his father had bought. Those books could have been the starting point in his psychology career. Skinner grew up in a very religious family.

While other psychologists believed that human psychology is a complex system because there are so many external influences, Skinner had believed that human’s mind is the same as other animals, which explains why he had done experiments using pigeons. Inspired by Watson and Pavlov, Skinner decided to study psychology and focused on behaviorism. Skinner’s theory was based on self-observation, which made him stood onto his believes regardless of the oppositions. In fact, during WW II, “Skinner convinced the military to fund his research--the famous Project Pigeon--to train pigeons to guide bombs and torpedoes.” (Greengrass, pg, 80) He chose pigeons because he thinks they live

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was born on March 20, 1904 in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. Skinner was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and a social philosopher. Skinner is known for his discovery of the theory of operant conditioning (Wikipedia). Skinner was a graduate from Harvard University. Although he understood the importance of classical conditioning, he noted that, “principles of classical conditioning account for only a small portion of learned behaviors” (Woolfolk 250). Skinner expressed that through operant conditioning, behavior is strengthened or weakened by antecedents or consequences. Both theorists’ work have a major influence on learning/behavioral concepts.

B.F. Skinner: He was one of the prominent propionates of a theory called behaviourism. He also constructed what became known as the ‘Skinner Box’. Within this box he discovered that a rat or a bird could be trained to obtain food by pressing a button. This he called ‘Operant Conditioning’ and ‘Negative Reinforcement’. According to Martin Fiebert, Professor of clinical