Token Economy Problem

A Brief Description The purpose of the article Helping Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders Solve Mathematics Word Problems (Alter, 2012) was to examine the effects of implementing a token economy when solving math problems for students with emotional and behavioral disorders. Math word problems include using higher order thinking to pick out useful information and using the right technique to answer the problem, which many students with disabilities have a hard time completing. Researchers aimed to find a way for four students to accurately solve word problems. During the intervention, these students were instructed to solve multistep math problems, and they were rewarded with tokens when each step was completed. Results indicated that all students showed great improvement for on task behavior and in math problem solving correctness.
Purpose and Research Questions The purpose of this article was to determine how a token economy could influence mathematical word problems. The two research questions are as follows: Does this intervention improve on task behavior during the mathematics instructional period, and does this intervention improve students` daily percentage of math word problems completed correctly.
Participants
Participants involved in the study included four boys, aged 10 to …show more content…
The baseline and intervention phase consisted of participants taking pretests prior to baseline data, and then working four times per week in 30-minute increments for baseline data (pre and post test) and 60 minute increments for intervention (daily work). For the intervention phase, the data collector would collect data on individual students work every 15 minutes until the hour was up. During the intervention phase, undergraduate helpers would give hole punches for each step completion while solving the math problems. Every 15 minutes, tokens were exchanged. It took 51 sessions for all students to complete the entire