Reflection Paper On Operant Conditioning

During my field experience I worked for a daycare called Elite Academy. I worked in the before school program with kids from the ages of three to nine. Over the course of working my ten hours, I was able to get to know the kids pretty well. One boy in particular seemed to have a difficult time with handling his anger and emotions towards other children. We’ll call him Jason for the sake of this assignment. Jason is about four years old and is in pre-k. Since I noticed that he was having some behavioral problems I decided to use a concept from the theory of operant conditioning. Operant conditioning is all about trying to strengthen a desired behavior or weaken an undesirable behavior. You can use either punishment or reinforcement to achieve these goals. Punishment is used when you are trying to diminish or weaken the behavior. There are two different forms of it, positive and negative. Positive punishment is when you give a consequence after the undesirable behavior in order to try to weaken the behavior. For example; a student was misbehaving in class so the teacher gives her a …show more content…
For instance, Jason was playing with a bucket of cars one day and a friend tried playing with him. Jason didn’t want to let the other boy play with him so he got angry and started yelling and pulling the cars away from him. When I asked him to share the cars with the little boy he said he didn’t want to share. I ended up taking the cars away from him because he would not share, which is where the negative punishment comes in to play. By taking the cars away from Jason, I was trying to weaken his behavior of yelling and not sharing with his other classmates. This tactic ended up being very effective for Jason. Later that day Jason was again playing with some toys and had classmates come to him that wanted to play as well. I saw that he struggled a little bit but in the end he did share his