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Biomedical subjects

T R Risley

Publications and source records attributed to T R Risley.

32 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1974

Recreation as a reinforcer: increasing membership and decreasing disruptions in an urban recreation centre.

It is presumed that recreation activities have a variety of functions for people, from tension reduction to citizenship development; however, a recreation activity's most empirically obvious function is as a reinforcer. This study demonstrates how two recurrent problems of urban recreation programs-recruitment of members and reduction of disruptive behaviors within the program-can be handled simply by contingently adjusting the amount of time the recreation activities are available. When extra time in the recreation center was provided to those youths who brought new members, dramatic increases in membership were achieved. On the other hand, when the closing time for each evening's recreation program was publicly moved forward by a few minutes for each offense, disruptive behaviors were nearly eliminated. Recreation used as a reinforcer can thus improve the basic operation of a recreation center and might similarly enhance other presumed and desired functions of recreation.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1974

Open environment design for infant and toddler day care.

Group care settings for dependent people must be organized to facilitate delivery of responsive care and to prevent inadvertant neglect or deliberate abuse. Accordingly, in an infant and a toddler day-care center, an open environment was examined as a means to increase the visibility of children to staff and of staff-child interactions to the supervisor, and to investigate potential adverse effects of the open environment on infants' and toddlers' activities. These studies demonstrated that: (1) an open environment markedly decreased the amount of time a child could not be seen by any adult and the amount of time staff members' activities were not visible to the supervisor, and markedly reduced the effort required to supervise those who were not immediately visible; (2) an open environment did not adversely affect the sleep of either infants or toddlers; and (3) an open environment is as conducive to small group pre-academic activities with toddlers as is a separate room. These studies convinced us that infant and toddler day care can and should be accomplished in an open environment.

Child Day Care Centers↗
PubMed1973

The effects of play materials on social play.

To increase cooperative and social behaviors in children, contingency management programs have been successfully employed. This study examined the possibility that children's social behavior might also be significantly influenced by the nature of the available play materials. Children in an urban recreation center were systematically provided with toys designed for social or isolate play. It was found that social play occurred only 16% of the time when the children were provided with "isolate" toys, whereas social play occurred 78% of the time when children were provided with "social" toys. Thus, the selection of play materials should be an important consideration in any effort to teach children social behaviors.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1972

The organization of day-care environments: "zone" versus "man-to-man" staff assignments.

In a large day-care center, measures of group participation were used to compare how much of a child's time is lost from planned activities during the daily transition from lunch, through the bathroom and dressing areas, to the nap area. Participation measures were taken using the "Zone" and "Man-to-Man" staffing procedures, two typical methods for dividing responsibility among teaching staff. In the "Zone" procedure, each teacher was assigned responsibility for a particular area, and for all children who passed through that area. In the "Man-to-Man" procedure, each teacher was assigned responsibility for shepherding a group of designated children through all activity areas during each transition. The Lunch-to-Nap transition using the Zone staffing assignment was accomplished with a smaller decrease in child participation in planned activities than the transition utilizing the Man-to-Man procedure. Thus, other things being equal, it is recommended that the Zone procedure be used in group-care programs with more than one staff member, with each teacher being responsible for specific activity areas, rather than specific children.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1972

The organization of day-care environments: required versus optional activities.

Measures of group participation were used in an experimental analysis of the effects of two preschool activity schedules. Children's participation in preschool activities remained as high when children were allowed no options but were required to follow a schedule of activities in sequence, as when they were free to choose between several optional activities. However, this was only true: (1) when a child was not forced to wait until all other children had finished, but could start the next required activity individually as soon as he had finished the preceding one, and (2) when there was an abundance of materials in each required activity. When there were not adequate materials in each activity, children's participation was disrupted unless they were free to choose among several optional activities. Thus, in order to maintain high levels of participation in preschool play activities, it is not necessary to allow children to choose among several alternative activities. High participation may be more efficiently maintained by providing a supply of materials that is adequate to occupy all children in each of a sequence of required activities and staffing by at least two teachers, so that while one teacher is supervising children still finishing one activity another teacher can supervise children who are ready to start the next.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1970

Emphasis as a prompt for verbal imitation.

Four- and five-yr-old disadvantaged children were read sentences composed of varying numbers of short phrases. The children were asked to repeat each sentence, but the accuracy of their imitations was not differentially reinforced. The teacher stressed (emphasized) certain words as she read each sentence. The proportion of words that were stressed was systematically varied. In general, the children imitated only parts of most sentences. Stress was effective in influencing which parts of a sentence the children would imitate, but only when relatively few words were stressed. Stressing a word increased the probability of a child's imitating that word (and, to a large extent, the entire phrase containing that word) as an inverse function of the proportion of the words that were stressed.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1968

Establishing use of descriptive adjectives in the spontaneous speech of disadvantaged preschool children.

From observer records, a count was made for each child, in a group of disadvantaged children in an experimental preschool, of usage and acquisition of descriptive adjectives, with and without noun referents. Procedures were sought which would effectively modify the low rates of adjective-noun combinations in the everyday language of all the children. Time in school, intermittent teacher praise, and social and intellectual stimulation were not effective in changing the low rates of using adjectives of size and shape. Group teaching effectively increased rates of using color- and number-noun combinations in the group-teaching situation, but was ineffective in changing rates of usage in the children's "spontaneous" vocabularies. By operating directly on the children's language in the free-play situation, making access to preschool materials contingent upon use of a color-noun combination, significant increases in such usage were effected in the spontaneous vocabularies of all the children. Preschool materials apparently functioned as powerful reinforcers. Though traditional teaching procedures were effective in generating adjective-noun combinations in that restricted situation, it was only through application of environmental contingencies that color names as descriptive adjectives were effectively and durably established in all the children's spontaneous vocabularies.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1968

The effects and side effects of punishing the autistic behaviors of a deviant child.

Timeout procedures in the home and extinction and reinforcement of incompatible behaviors in the laboratory failed to eliminate the disruptive and dangerous climbing behavior of a deviant child. Punishment with electric shock was used to eliminate this behavior in the laboratory and then in the home. The effects were reversible and were restricted to specific stimulus conditions. A less severe form of punishment was used to eliminate the child's autistic rocking. Other behaviors of the subject were continuously measured in the laboratory to determine the side effects of punishment. No suppression of other behaviors correlated with punishment was noted. However, the rate of some behaviors increased when punishment was used to eliminate deviant behaviors, but these increases were, primarily, desirable.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1968

The role of social and material reinforcers in increasing talking of a disadvantaged preschool child.

Adult social reinforcement and access to materials in the preschool were made contingent on the verbalizations of a 4-yr-old Negro girl with an extremely low frequency of talking. Though the teachers' social attention was always given immediately for all spontaneous speech, if the child's spontaneous verbalizations were requests for materials, those materials were withheld until she had responded to the teachers' questions about those materials. When she was silent, the teachers withheld their attention and the materials. A high frequency of verbal behavior was quickly established. When both teacher attention and materials were provided only when the child was not verbalizing, the child's frequency of talking immediately decreased. When social attention and materials were again made contingent upon spontaneous speech and answering questions, the child's frequency of talking quickly increased to its previous high level. The content of the child's verbal behavior which increased was primarily a repetition of requests to the teachers with little change noted in the non-request verbalizations, or verbalizations to other children. A further experimental analysis demonstrated that social interaction per se was not the reinforcer which maintained the increased verbalization; rather, for this child, the material reinforcers which accompanied the social interaction appeared to be the effective components of teacher attention.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1968

Developing correspondence between the non-verbal and verbal behavior of preschool children.

Correspondence was developed between children's non-verbal and verbal behavior such that their non-verbal behavior could be altered simply by reinforcing related verbal behavior. Two groups of six children each were given food snack at the end of the day: for reporting use of a specific preschool material during free play (procedure A); and then only for reports of use which corresponded to actual use of that material earlier that day (procedure B). Initially, procedure A alone had little or no effect on the children's use of materials. Procedure B resulted in all of the children in one group actually using a specific material, and after repeating procedures A and B with this group across a series of different materials, procedure A alone was sufficient to significantly increase use of a specific material. Correspondence between verbal and non-verbal behavior was produced such that, in this group of 4-yr-old disadvantaged Negro children, "saying" controlled "doing" 22 or more hours later. In the second group, procedure B initially did not increase the use of a specific material; rather, the children's reports decreased so as to correspond to the intermittent use of the material. It appeared from subsequent procedures with this group that maintenance of a high level of reporting was crucial to the saying-then-doing correspondence seen in the first group.

Journal Article↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Shoplifting prevention: providing information through signs.

Shoplifting is one of the most frequent crimes in the United States, yet there is no agreement about effective prevention procedures. Since most prevention strategies are aimed at either increasing public awareness of the severity of the consequences or increasing the threat of detection, procedures that contain these elements were evaluated. Posting signs around a department of a department store pointing out that shoplifting is a crime, etc., partially reduced shoplifting rates. When merchandise that was frequently taken was identified by signs and stars, shoplifting decreased to near zero. Publicity campaigns to inform the public of consequences for shoplifting may produce desirable results, but identifying likely shoplifting targets, which may increase the likelihood of detection, effectively reduces shoplifting rates.

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