Frank C. Leeming

Critical Review of Behavioral Interventions to Preserve the Environment Research Since 1980

This review integrates and evaluates the environmental-preservation research published during the 1980s. The focus is environmental behavior change as targeted by behavior analysts and others designing interventions to encourage environmental-preservation behavior. A modified taxonomy of behavioral interventions, based on a taxonomy presented by Geller et al., categorizes these reported interventions by antecedent and consequence conditions. Fifty-four studies were categorized and evaluated according to which of these taxonomic interventions were reported. The conclusions were that (a) antecedent conditions using commitment, demonstration, and goal-setting strategies were generally most effective in encouraging environmentally responsible behavior, and (b) consequence conditions were effective in producing behavior change during the experiments duration. However, some other important findings were that (a) much of the research in this field during the 1980s did not directly compare interventions, (b) few meaningful follow-up measures were reported, and those evaluations that included follow-up assessment showed little maintenance of the behavior changes, and (c) many potentially effective intervention strategies have been ignored (i.e., group interventions and penalties). Suggestions for future directions of research to produce and maintain environmental-preservation behaviors are offered.

Children's Environmental Attitude and Knowledge Scale: Construction and Validation

Abstract In this article, the construction and validation of an environmental attitude and knowledge scale designed for children are described. The scale fills a need, expressed by several writers in environmental education, for a research instrument that has sound psychometric properties, can be used in a variety of research settings, and will allow comparisons of results across studies.

Solid Waste Recovery A Review of Behavioral Programs to Increase Recycling

Twenty-four Earth Days have come and gone and science is still concerned with making our world more proenvironmental. Applied behavioral science in particular has been very active in leading research efforts to develop interventions aimed at encouraging proenvironmental behavior. This article documented the labors of researchers who specifically targeted recycling with behavior change programs. Twenty-seven articles describing 31 experiments were reviewed. The interventions in these articles were categorized into antecedents (i.e., conditions introduced prior to the target behavior) and consequences (i.e., conditions presented after the target behavior occurred). Twenty of the experiments manipulated antecedent conditions as the primary intervention, 10 focused on consequences, and 1 used both. The general conclusion of the review was that the years of effort have produced several successful interventions that showed promise for increasing recycling behavior. Unfortunately, though, very few of these interventions demonstrated response maintenance after being discontinued, a finding common for such interventions not only targeting recycling but behavior change in general. The discussion focused on the need for (a) interventions to motivate long-term changes in behavior and (b) interventions aimed at reducing the amount of waste generated.

The Effect of Commitment on Adoption and Diffusion of Grass Cycling

Using a design that also permitted an assessment of the extent to which any increase in grass-cycling behavior diffused to the neighbors of treated participants, two types of commitment strategies for promoting residential grass cycling (i.e., not bagging grass clippings) were investigated. Baseline data were collected over a period of 4 weeks to determine which residents in each of three homogeneous neighborhoods bagged grass clippings for curbside pickup. A total of 558 houses observed to bag grass clippings during this period were included as participants in the experiment. Following baseline, the neighborhoods were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. Results indicated that participants who made a commitment to grass cycle and to talk to their neighbors had grass bags present significantly less often than either the commitment-only or control participants. This effect was present during the 4-week intervention period and also was sustained during an immediate 4-week follow-up period and a delayed 4-week follow-up period 12 months later. There also was a diffusion effect in which the neighbors of targeted participants showed significantly more grass cycling than controls, and this effect continued to increase through the 1-year follow-up measure. On the other hand, neither commitment-only participants nor their neighbors differed from controls during any period of the experiment.

Evaluation of a fire‐safety training program for preschool children

Children under the age of 5 are 2.5 times more likely to die from fire than any other childhood age group. The work described here is an empirical evaluation of a fire-safety program for preschool children, involving 10 child-care facilities and 443 children ages 3, 4 and 5 years. Children in six centers received an 18-week fire-safety training program called Kid Safe. Children in four other centers were assigned to the delayed-treatment condition and constituted the comparison group. All children were pretested using a comprehensive measure of fire-safety knowledge before the start of the study. The same test was readministered to all children following presentation of the program to the treatment group. At each of the three ages, children in the treatment group showed significantly greater knowledge gains from pretest to post-test than did children in the comparison group. Interestingly, 3-year-olds showed the greatest change of any age group. These findings provide support for the value of training preschool children in fire safety as an important strategy for injury prevention in this age group.

Studying parental involvement in school-based sex education: lessons learned.

With the aim of increasing parental involvement in school-based family life education we examined the value of supplementing the curriculum with joint parent-child homework assignments. In addition we sought to assess the efficacy of a voluntary parental training program that taught techniques for increasing communication between parents and children. The purpose of this article is to share some of our experiences in this area and to provide some insights to others contemplating evaluation work in school-based sexuality education. (excerpt)

Problem solving, recall, isomorphic transfer, and nonisomorphic transfer among third-grade and fourth-grade children

Abstract Analogical reasoning processes were studied in third- and fourth-grade children. During acquisition, each child received analogs of one of the following seven-move scheduling problems: “farmers dilemma,” “three missionaries/two cannibals,” or “tower of Hanoi.” On each presentation of a problem, the child heard a list of statements representing the exact series of moves necessary to solve the problem and was immediately asked to recall the list. Physical materials representing the problem were then produced and the child was asked to solve it. A trial was terminated and a new one begun when an error was made on the physical task. Following acquisition, the children were transferred to either an isomorphic analog or an analog from one of the other training conditions. During acquisition, the propositions representing the solution to each problem were acquired piecemeal and incrementally, but consolidation of the generalizable problem representation was abrupt. Isomorphic transfer was good in all conditions, but nonisomorphic transfer was unexpectedly asymmetrical. This finding was discussed in terms of each problem space, number of solution paths, and similarity relations.

Encouraging Proenvironmental Behavior The Environmental Court as Contingency Manager

This article presents a case history of the development of an enforcement system for controlling environmental problems in an urban setting. It details a long-term effort to coordinate and refine the judicial and executive branches of local government to allow the effective application of consequences to manage environmental-code violations. Special emphasis is placed on how incorporation of behavioral principles resulted in a system that has become a model for communities throughout the United States.

Resistance To Extinction vs. Resistance to Reinforcement to Measure Inhibition

These experiments compare resistance to reinforcement and resistance to extinction techniques for measuring inhibitory stimulus control by S — following discrimination training. In Experiment 1, rats received 24 sessions of training on a discrimination between two lights and then the inhibitory properties of S — were measured with either the resistance to reinforcement or resistance to extinction technique. Acquisition or extinction of responding to the former S — was compared to that to a novel stimulus. As expected, the resistance to extinction technique indicated more inhibition and the size of the difference increased throughout three sessions of testing. In Experiment 2, rats received 15 or 30 days of training on the discrimination problem and then all of the rats received combined-cues tests of the inhibitory properties of S —. Following 2 days of additional discrimination training, the rats were assigned to resistance to reinforcement or resistance to extinction test conditions. Resistance to extinction again indicated more inhibition than resistance to reinforcement at both levels of training, and combined-cue testing indicated the highest levels of inhibition. At the lower level of training, resistance to reinforce-ment gave no evidence of any inhibition. These data were interpreted as showing that the resistance to reinforcement technique is relatively insen-sitive, particularly to low levels of inhibition. This finding is consistent with the notion that discrimination training renders S — more condition-able as well as inhibitory.

The Resistance to Reinforcement Technique for Measuring Inhibition

This experiment investigated use of the resistance to reinforcement procedure to measure the inhibitory properties of a negative discriminative stimulus (S-) following discrimination training. One group of rats initially learned a problem with Cue Light 1 as the positive discriminative stimulus (S + ) and Cue Light 2 as S-; a second group had equal training with house light on as S + and dark as S-. During subsequent testing both groups were reinforced for responding to both dark and Cue Light 2. Thus, inhibitory properties of each S- could be evaluated by both within- and between-subject comparisons, with responding to a novel stimulus as the baseline in both cases. Between- and within-subject comparisons corresponded perfectly with both showing the dark S- to be a strong inhibitor, but neither showing the Cue Light 2 S- to have inhibitory properties. A possible explanation of the latter result is that discrimination learning involves two stages. In the first, excitatory properties of S- are lost, and only then does further training result in the development of true inhibition. The light-dark problem was learned quickly, and training continued well beyond the point where responding to S-was very low. Thus, it is not surprising that strong inhibition was demonstrated. With the more difficult problem, subjects achieved good discrimination performance only near the end of training and responding to S- was still relatively high. Thus, training may not have been sufficient to get beyond the stage of reducing excitation and into the development of true inhibition.