Elizabeth M. Goetz

The Teaching of Creativity to Preschool Children

The presentation of the behavior analysis approach for the teaching of creativity to preschool children requires many subtopics. As a starting point, it will be a fruitful exercise to delineate the obvious differences between the behavior analysis and traditional approaches to training creativity so the reader may be aware of the path to be taken. Before trod-ding down this path, mention will be made of some other professionals who share with behavior analysts a belief in the early training of creativity, though they have chosen to take different paths.

Beginnings of Reading The Effects of the Preschool Reading Center

This study examined the effects of the daily Reading Center in a preschool classroom on 16 children over a school year. Objective variables, related to the Center and derived from the interface between the concepts of developmentally appropriate practice and emergent literacy, were measured. The Center was found to be developmentally appropriate since it was child-centered in terms of the interaction with children, adults and materials, voluntary participation, child-selected words, and individualized instruction based on a pretest for 20 beginning reading skills (i.e., emergent literacy). Concurrently, the Center had features of a teacher-centered activity with the implementation of a rather specific instructional procedure. The experimental children showed marked gains in their acquisition of the 20 beginning reading skills while their matched controls, in other classrooms, who did not have the Reading Center experience, showed a slight increase. The advantages are discussed of a detailed behavior analysis on related independent, dependent, and accompanying measures for a thorough understanding of the results.

In defense of curriculum themes

As the children straggle into the room Monday morning, their eyes fall on a new piece of equipment. One of them asks, “What are we gonna do today?”

Preschool children's acquisition, maintenance, and generalization. A study of three reading procedures.

This study examined the three reading procedures of sight, syllable blending, and phonics blending to determine which was the most efficient one to teach words for acquisition, maintenance, and various types of generalization. Six typical preschool children who did not recall and recognize the training words were selected as subjects. An individual analysis design was used in which all the subjects were taught all words, counterbalanced across the three reading procedures. All reading procedures were tailored to allow for the same number of training responses while using the identical modeling, imitation, and reinforcement technique. Results showed the sight procedure took the fewest training sessions to acquisition with the smallest number of errors, in comparison with syllable and phonics. But all words, regardless of the type of training, were maintained equally well. Considering the generalization measures, however, each procedure had unique advantages. Therefore, it is speculated how the three procedures might be combined for the beginning reader.

Helping parents work and raise children

Working parents and day care are here to stay. By 1990, the United States will have an estimated 24.3 million children under six years of age, a 36% increase from 1979. At least 10.5 million of these children will be members of two wage-earner or single working-parent families, a 63% increase since 1979 (Edelman, 1981). Furthermore, by the year 2000 the typical family will have two wage earners (Menninger, 1981).

Whole Class Settings and Part Class Settings.

planaria has contracted or not, i.e., whether it exhibited the conditioned response. Thus at least two independent observers are required to rate the animals performance. This procedure is an ideal lead-in to questions regarding the construction of rating scales, to reliability, and to doubleblind procedures. The use of planaria also has special relevance to control questions pertinent to the study of learning inasmuch as the demonstration of c lassical condi t ioning i n planar ia (Thompson & McConnell, 1955) has been questioned on methodological grounds (James & Halas, 1964). The controversy permits the introduction of the problem of pseudoconditioning and of sensitization, and the need to control for procedure artifacts in order to demonstrate true learning. To demonstrate general questions of psychology and ethology. Observation of the planaria swimming in the petri dishes can be used to demonstrate some ethological concepts such as phototropic and geotropic movements. Such observations were built into the instrumental learning laboratory in that data were collected concerning whether the dark or light side of the dish was preferred by the planaria. (Because planaria are negatively phototropic a dark side preference can be expected). The demonstration of true learning in planaria is especially exciting since this learning occurs in such a simple organism. The question arises as to how learning is physiologically represented. The presence of true synaptic transmission in these animals permits an ideal introduction to theories of learning which depend on changes at the synapse (Hebb, 1972). Finally, the classical conditioning of planaria has been used as the first step in studying the biochemistry of memory (McConnell, 1962; McConnell, Jacobson, & Kimble, 1959). The laboratory demonstration can thus be extended in that direction, especially if the introductory text being used is biologically oriented (e.g., Krech, Crutchfield & Livson, 1974, pp. 416-442; McConnell, 1977, pp. 368-383). To demonstrate the behavioral approach to maladaptive activities. When shocked repeatedly the animal becomes lethargic, an effect which Best (1963) discussed in terms of an emotional, frustration response. The manifestation of this phenomenon has proven to be a useful introduction to learned helplessness, and hence to one learning explanation of depression. It also serves as a peg for questions related to consciousness, the need to postulate inner mental states, and to behaviourism.