Do we prepare teachers for the schools we wish all children could attend or do we prepare teachers for the schools where they are most likely to find a position? The authors address the often-asked question What do beginning teachers need to know? by making the case that we must prepare teachers for the disparate conditions found on the educational landscape. Public policy decisions, economic conditions, and the teaching profession itself have created two systems of schooling in America. One system values the professionalism of teachers and believes education is broad in its definition. The other system offers a myopic focus on test scores and defines teaching as nothing more than content delivery. Schools of education must become agents of change by preparing teachers steeped in the realities of modern schools but aware of the power of an individual teacher to impart change.
Two pairs of experiments enabled students to compare their own operant behaviors with those of rats. The students played computer games for points, and the rats pressed levers for food. The first pair of experiments showed that, under concurrent schedules of reinforcement, relative frequencies of choices between two alternatives increased linearly in rats and people as functions of relative frequencies of reinforcement, with similar biases and undermatching observed in both species. The second pair of experiments showed that behavioral variability was controlled by reinforcers contingent on variability,this again true for both species. These experiments helped demonstrate the relevance of animal operant research to an explanation of human operant behavior.Introductory psychology at Reed College is a broadly based year-long course combining lectures, conferences, and research in all major areas of psychology. One section at the beginning of the second semester focused on operant behavior. An issue for students is whether studying animals is relevant to an explanation ofhuman actions. To enable students to compare human and rat behaviors, we developed two pairs ofprocedures in which rats pressing levers for food paralleled students playing computer games for points. Prior to playing the games, the students were not informed ofthe relationship between the rat and human procedures.We wanted the students to accomplish three goals: to study the influences of reinforcement contingencies, to compare their own behaviors to those ofrats, and, because the students were themselves subjects, to evaluate how their subjective evaluations of the contingencies were related to the actual contingencies. During 30 years ofteaching introductory psychology, the senior author has found no better way to demonstrate the importance of studying the operant responses of animal models.
EXPERIMENT lA Concurrent Choice in RatsThe study of choices by animals constitutes a major area of research (Williams, 1988). Under the commonly This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation to A.N. The authors thank Gene Olson for excellent animal care and a helpful reading of the manuscript. All programs were written in True Basic and can be obtained (for use with Macintosh computers) from the authors. The human programs can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.reed.eduJreed/projects/neuringer/. The rat programs require specialized interfaces and operant equipment. Correspondence and requests for the two computer games (for use with Macintosh computers) should be addressed to A. Neuringer, Psychology Department, Reed College, Portland, OR 97202 (e-mail: allen_neuringer@reed.edu).used "concurrent reinforcement" procedure, a rat or pigeon is presented with two alternatives, each associated with a different reinforcement rate. A matching relationship is sometimes observed, showing that the proportion of choices between the two operanda (e.g., left and right levers) equals the proportion of reinforcements obtained for responding on ...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.