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NATIONAL FORUM OF EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION AND SUPERVISION JOURNAL VOLUME 26, NUMBER 3, 2009-2010

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION: HOW A CHICKEN CAN HELP TEACH OPERANT CONDITIONING Mary Ann Hooten Frank Hammonds Troy University ABSTRACT Students often find it difficult to learn the basic principles of operant conditioning. For example, many students confuse negative reinforcement with punishment. For this reason, several authors have evaluated the effectiveness of various methods of teaching such concepts as reinforcement, punishment, and extinction. For the current study, the first author created a video detailing how to teach a chicken to discriminate between playing cards in such a way that this behavior could be incorporated into a card trick. This video was then evaluated in introductory psychology classes. The video resulted in greater retention of the material covered than did lectures alone.

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any instructors have likely encountered difficulty in getting students to learn the distinctions between positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment, as well as other basic terms associated with operant conditioning. This is distressing since the definitions required in most introductory psychology classes are so simple. Shields and Gredler (2003) found that participants did not perform well when attempting to answer questions regarding reinforcement and punishment. They observed that students would often define negative reinforcement as punishing bad behavior. They were able to improve student performance in this area by utilizing interactive demonstrations, providing written and verbal feedback for student responses, and by having students complete exercises.

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Lukas, Marr, and Maple (1998) had students train animals at a zoo. This probably improved the students’ understanding of the material. In addition, students reported enjoying the training and most of the students spent more time training the animals than was required. While training at a zoo may not be practical in all cases, this highlights the usefulness in finding something the students enjoy. Best and Batsell (1998) demonstrated taste-aversion in a classroom setting using 2 adult albino rats. The students enjoyed these demonstrations and rated them as valuable learning experiences. However, as the authors pointed out, many students do not have access to live animal demonstrations of conditioning procedures. Another approach that has been used was to incorporate a service-learning activity to help teach the principles of operant conditioning while assisting with a social cause. McDonald (2005) described how students trained dogs in animal shelters to become more adoptable, thus resulting in benefits for the students, shelter staff, the dogs themselves, and their potential new owners. While it can be very beneficial for students to have hands-on experiences in animal training, this may not always be practical. In cases where it is difficult to get students to animal shelters or the zoo, an alternative approach might be to incorporate video of this type of training. According to Eskicioglu (2003), instructional techniques that involve multimedia, such as video, can improve performance of lower achievers and increase interest in learning. Baggett (1987) found that students performed better on an assembly task when presented with a combination of video instruction and practice than with practice alone. Based on these findings, the current study investigated the effectiveness of a video created by the first author. This video was designed to help students learn basic terms such as reinforcement, punishment, and shaping. The video shows a 4-month-old male Dutch Bantam chicken being trained to peck at a certain playing card, the queen of hearts, and not to peck at other cards. This behavior was later

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incorporated into a card trick in which the chicken appears to know which card a person has drawn from the deck. This video was designed to be fun for the students and was intended to be a practical substitute for a live in-class demonstration of conditioning. Method There were 126 participants in this study who were enrolled in four different sections of a General Psychology course. The sections were taught by three different faculty members. The study was conducted using a between-groups design, where two of the sections watched the video first and then listened to a lecture on the principles of operant conditioning. The other two groups listened to a lecture on this subject first and then watched the video. Two tests were given to each group to measure knowledge of operant conditioning and other information. One test was administered after watching the video and one after listening to the lecture. These two tests were identical in that they each contained the same 9 factual questions related to operant conditioning and 2 questions related to student perceptions of teaching an animal a trick. The only difference between the two tests was that the test that was administered after the video also contained 3 questions that measured the student’s attitudes about the video. Individual student scores on the test after the video were compared to the scores on the test after the lecture. Results A paired samples t-test was used to compare the scores from the test given after the lecture and the test given after the video. Results indicated that, regardless of condition, the mean score on the video test was higher than on the lecture test. The mean score of the video test was 71.38 and the mean score of the lecture test was 64.0.

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This was a found to be a significant difference (p < .000). However, the mean score on the test was highest after viewing the video and watching the lecture at 73.86 which was significantly different from the lecture only test (p < .000) but not significantly different from the video only (p = .170). A second analysis was conducted on each of the 9 factual questions to examine differences between percent correct after viewing the video only, after listening to the lecture only, and after viewing the video and listening to the lecture. Table One displays the findings. A third analysis was conducted to determine differences in two specific questions related to the video. The first of these questions asked, “Is it possible to teach a chicken a card trick?” Before seeing the video, only 72.2 percent of participants answered affirmatively, but after watching the video, 96.8 percent answered affirmatively. This difference is significant at the .000 level. The next question that was analyzed in this manner was, “How confident are you that you could teach an animal to perform a trick?” Before watching the video, 32.5 percent reported that they were “very confident”, 57.9 percent reported that they were “somewhat confident”, and 9.5 percent reported that they were “not at all confident”. After viewing the video, these percentages increased to 43.7, 53.2, and 3.2 respectively. This difference was significant at the .001 level. The fourth and final analysis examined frequency distributions of the three item designed to measure student attitudes towards the video. The first item asked participants to rate their level of agreement with the statement, “I learned a lot from ‘Chanticleer the Amazing Rooster’ video” as either strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, or strongly agree. Out of the 126 participants, 70.6% responded as either agree or strongly agree. For the second item, “I enjoyed watching ‘Chanticleer the Amazing Rooster’ video”, 70.0%

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responded either agree or strongly agree. The final video-related item asked participants to respond to the following statement, “Watching ‘Chanticleer the Amazing Rooster’ video helped me to understand the class material on operant conditioning. For this question, 76.9% responded either agree or strongly agree. These three attitudinal items seem to indicate that the video was perceived as an enjoyable and valuable addition to the class. Table 1—Percent of Students Answering Each Question Correctly in Each Group. Percent Answering Correctly Lecture Only Video Only Lecture & Video Question Question 1: What type of animal 32.4 63.8 69.8 training uses food as a reward? Question 2: Which technique 89.7 93.1 94.4 should be used to teach a behavior that you want to have repeated? Question 3: Which technique should be used to eliminate an 44.1 46.6 70.6 unwanted behavior? Question 4: Not reinforcing behavior means… Question 5: Reinforcing each and every correct response is can a(n) __________ schedule of reinforcement. Question 6: Reinforcing every other or every 10th response would be examples of a(n) ______________ schedule of reinforcement.

42.6

75.9

67.5

73.5

86

87.3

72.1

79.3

76.2

Question 7: The Law of Effect states ___________.

86.8

94.8

92.9

Question 8: Who is credited with the Law of Effect? Question 9: Rewarding successive approximations of a behavior until the desired behavior is accomplished is called _________.

35.3

27.6

46.8

41.2

46.6

51.6

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Discussion The results clearly indicated that, compared to the lectures, the video resulted in a statistically significant increase in correct answers by the students. This is particularly impressive since the video was approximately 12 minutes long and the lectures were approximately 45 minutes long. While the results showed that the video and lecture together produced higher scores than the video alone, this difference was not significant. This was true regardless of the order in which the lecture and video were presented. This suggests that this video would make an effective supplement to, or could even replace part of, a lecture regarding operant conditioning and that instructors could insert the video at the beginning of end of their lectures as they saw fit. In addition to the increased test scores, after watching the video students were more likely to say that it was possible to teach a chicken to do a card trick and were more likely to say that they themselves could do so. It is possible that this increased confidence could result in a greater willingness to attempt to apply operant conditioning and/or result in greater interest in the subject. This study joins those mentioned above in that the component added to lectures resulted in higher test scores and was enjoyed by the students. An advantage of this video is that it requires much less time than the techniques used in the other studies. While it is difficult to compare a video to working with live animals at a zoo, this video is much less expensive and more practical than some of the activities used previously.

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REFERENCES Baggett, P. (1987). Learning a procedure from multimedia instructions: The effects of film and practice. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1, 183-195. Best, M. R., & Batsell, W. R. (1998). A classroom demonstration of taste-aversion learning. Teaching of Psychology, 25(2), 116118. Eskicioglu, A.M. (2003). The ideal multimedia-enabled classroom: Perspectives from psychology, education, and information science. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 12(2), 199-221. Lukas, K. E., Marr, M. J., & Maple, T. L. (1998). Teaching operant conditioning at the zoo. Teaching of Psychology, 25(2), 112116. McDonald, T.W. (2005). Teaching and learning operant principles in animal shelters: Perspectives from faculty, students, and shelter staff. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 32(4), 310-321. Shields, C. & Gredler, M. (2003). A problem –solving approach to teaching operant conditioning. Teaching of Psychology, 30(2), 114-116.