Abstract
The reason I did this project was that I had mixed opinions on every subject that I had, that were been taught by a different teacher. I came to the conclusion that maybe a teacher could affect your opinion on a particular topic and thus affecting your attitude towards the topic in general, and in turn affecting your grade. I also thought that maybe it was my personal preference, but then I thought back again to the subjects that I liked and that I disliked. I looked upon my grades for those two classes and I found out that I preformed better academically when I liked the class and the teacher. This made me think that maybe a teacher does affect your grade.
The project that I have chosen to do is about the different elements of teaching that affect a student’s grade, things like how the teacher approached the lesson and how the students responded to them, and the class. We looked at different aspects of teaching and more closely at positive and negative reinforcement. We looked closely at skinners theory- that extreme reinforcement works, it doesn’t matter if it is positive or negative reinforcement, it just has to be extreme.
I researched about positive and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is - ‘‘A behaviour followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behaviour occurring in the future.’’(see appendix iii) In my opinion positive reinforcement
is occurs when a teacher offers a reward for a desired behaviour that the teacher wants the students to have.
Negative reinforcement is - ‘‘A behaviour no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behaviour occurring in the future.’’ (see appendix iii). In my opinion, negative reinforcement is when a teacher doesn’t want their students behaviour anymore, therefore the teacher would remove something that the students desire.
We also looked at different learning styles. We explained what they were and what type of person would use them. Also, in the before test that we gave to the three classes, we added two questions on how they study and what they prefer, so we then could determine what type of learner they are, and we could see what the most common learning style was amongst the students.
For this project we went into three first year science classes and we observed the teacher teaching their classes. With us we had observations sheets (see appendix ii) and on them were clarities of positive and negative reinforcement. After observing the classes we went in to them and thought them either positively reinforced, negatively reinforced or as a control, which had a balance of both positive and negative reinforcement. We tested the students twice, the before test, was about us seeing how the class was academically and from those results we expected a class to get a certain grade. The after test was to find out which type of reinforcement was better, and then we could compare the two tests to see if our teaching methods affect the students and also to see the affects reinforcement has on the students.
Before we started this experiment we both thought that the positively reinforced class would perform better than the negatively reinforced class and the class that was used as a control. We had a control class, that was taught with a balance of positive and negative reinforcement, we used the control class as a comparison, so we could compare the results between positive and negative reinforcement But, we were mistaken. From our results it is clear that the students in the control class preformed better that the students in the negatively and positively reinforced classes. This means that skinners theory (see appendix iii) about the extreme reinforcement be it positive or negative, would be the best, was not proven by our experiment, but we did prove that extreme reinforcement did not work, but if a class had a good balance of positive and negative reinforcement then the students would perform well.
I have made some changes to the above
The reason I did this project was that I had mixed opinions on every subject that I had, that were been taught by a different teacher. I came to the conclusion that maybe a teacher could affect your opinion on a particular topic and thus affecting your attitude towards the topic in general, and in turn affecting your grade. I also thought that maybe it was my personal preference, but then I thought back again to the subjects that I liked and that I disliked. I looked upon my grades for those two classes and I found out that I preformed better academically when I liked the class and the teacher. This made me think that maybe a teacher does affect your grade.
The project that I have chosen to do is about the different elements of teaching that affect a student’s grade, things like how the teacher approached the lesson and how the students responded to them, and the class. We looked at different aspects of teaching and more closely at positive and negative reinforcement. We looked closely at skinners theory- that extreme reinforcement works, it doesn’t matter if it is positive or negative reinforcement, it just has to be extreme.
I researched about positive and negative reinforcement. Positive reinforcement is - ‘‘A behaviour followed by a reinforcing stimulus results in an increased probability of that behaviour occurring in the future.’’(see appendix iii) In my opinion positive reinforcement occurs when a teacher offers a reward for a desired behaviour that the teacher wants the students to have.
Negative reinforcement is - ‘‘A behaviour no longer followed by the reinforcing stimulus results in a decreased probability of that behaviour occurring in the future.’’ (see appendix iii). In my opinion, negative reinforcement is when a teacher doesn’t want their students behaviour anymore, therefore the teacher would remove something that the students desire.
We also looked at different learning styles. We explained what they were and what type of person would use them. Also, in the before test that we gave to the three classes, we added two questions on how they study and what they prefer, so we then could determine what type of learner they are, and we could see what the most common learning style was amongst the students.
For this project we went into three first year science classes and we observed the teacher teaching their classes. With us we had observations sheets (see appendix ii) and on them characteristic present in a class when using positive and negative reinforcement. After observing the classes we went in to each and taught them either positively reinforced, negatively reinforced or as a control, which had a balance of both positive and negative reinforcement. We tested the students twice, the before test, was about us seeing how the class was academically and from those results we expected a class to get a certain grade. The after test was to find out which type of reinforcement was better. We compared the two tests to see if our teaching methods affect the students academic achievement and if the reinforcement used had any affect on the students. We used the focus groups to discuss with students how they felt about the type of reinforcement that had been used in their lesson.
Before we started this experiment we both thought that the positively reinforced class would perform better than the negatively reinforced class and the control. In the control class, we taught with a balance of positive and negative reinforcement, we used the control class as a comparison, so we could compare the results between positive and negative reinforcement.
We were mistaken in our hypothesis. From our results it is clear that the students in the control class preformed better that the students in the negatively and positively reinforced classes. This means that skinners theory (see appendix iii) about the extreme reinforcement be it positive or negative, would be the best, was not proven by our experiment. We did indicate that extreme reinforcement did not work, but if a class had a good balance of positive and negative reinforcement then the students would perform well. Of course in order to completely over turn Skinners Theory we would have to carry out further research.
I have made changes to your abstract copy and pasteinto word. Check spelling adn grammer. Otherwise it is perfect.
Make sure that you have a capital S for Skinner. I am going off line now if you need we to check something text and I will check it up.
Well done and thanks again you have done an excellent project
Comment by mscrowe — 2010/01/12 @ 11:42 am