The Learning Paradigm
In attempts to understand learning and teaching, theorists have, over the past decades, embarked on the development of theories that depict standards of learning and teaching of students. For instance, behaviorism is a 19th-century theory that has come to gain acceptance as a learning paradigm during the initial decades of the 20th century. Believers in behaviorism perceive learning to cause visible and measurable behavioral change. Notably, every learner begins in a state of clarity and thus responds to the environmental stimuli. The responses a learner exhibits can be subject to negative or positive reinforcement, which can be punishment for undesirable or reward for unwanted behavior. Reward or punishments act as an incentive that encourages or discourage the repetition of certain conduct. Therefore, this paper will describe the in-depth concept of partial reinforcement in contrast with partial reinforcement schedule and discuss PRE’s relevance in daily life and insights of its useful application.
Normally, the essence of effective teaching and learning is behavioral change. Teachers teach to impart new positive behavior or eradicate an errant behavior in a student. Although the informal learning environment reinforcement of actions is often in real-world environments, responses are not always subject to support (Olson, &Hergenhann, 2011). Mount provides the best way of ensuring new desirable behaviors occur again, while negative behavior ceases from existence. Notably, the theory of partial support purports that the struggle against extinction becomes greater in the presence of a reward and when some responses become experience reinforcement. As a result, for partial reinforcement to occur, the reinforcement schedule must guide identifying an already established behavior desirable to maintain. Upon identification, behaviorists argue that such behavior responses do not require all-time reinforcement but time to time reinforcement. Although learners impart behaviors in learners slowly through partial support, the behavioral responses learners’ exhibit is enduring.
The reinforcement schedule, on the other hand, supports continuous behavioral reinforcement to enhance memorability. As a result, the reinforcement schedule guides how new behaviors acquired through learning can be improved through regular repetition of rewarding or punishing a certain action (Cherry and Susman, 2020). However, consistent use of continuous reinforcements only helps assure the teacher about behavioral establishment but not resistance to extinction. Therefore, partial support must always apply to help create long-term impacts in a learner.
The decisions on the type of behavioral reinforcement to apply to depend on several factors. In instances where one is trying to impart new behavior in a learner, a continuous reinforcement schedule is suitable to use (Olson, &Hergenhann, 2011). To ensure the learned behavior sticks to the learner’s culture over a long period, the teacher should then shift to partial behavioral reinforcement. One disadvantage with the continuous reinforcement schedule is that it may lead to the extinction of desirable behavior overtime when the learner reaches the reward satiation point. Therefore, because rewards do not guarantee long term behavioral change, partial reinforcement becomes a necessity.
In everyday life, partial reinforcement occurs more often compared to continuous support. For instance, it is unrealistic to reward one’s employees daily for timely reporting to work. If employees continue to receive rewards daily, they may fail to recognize the importance of tips and start coming to working late or unreasonably absentee themselves. However, when employees are given little tips less often, reality becomes evident, and productivity increases, less vulnerable to extinction (Cherry and Susman, 2020). Notably, partial reinforcement has the effect of reducing the probability of satiation immediately after the establishment of a behavior. Thus, if an employee no longer needs a reward, they may become reluctant and less productive. For instance, when food is the reward in teaching a dog how to sit the daily, eventually, when the dog is satisfied, it may fail to perform the behavior. Instead of using tangible rewards in continuous reinforcement, intangible reinforcements such as compliments, attention, and praise will positively reinforce an existing behavior.
In an organizational environment, partial reinforcement is an appropriate phenomenon for employee motivation. For instance, employees may develop negative behaviors in the workplace because they punish them the same way daily. However, if the manager fails to punish them for a while and then introduce a new punishment, employees may become wary of their negative behaviors and avoid them to prevent different penalties which they are oblivious about (Cherry, and Susman, 2020). Alternatively, denial of rewards employees used to receive regularly results in psychological frustrations that motivate employees to adopt and maintain positive responses over long periods.
Finally, this paper describes the concept of partial reinforcement in contrast with the continuous schedule reinforcement. The researcher identifies a contradicting difference between partial and constant reinforcement. While partial support discourages frequent use of support, continuous reinforcements advocates for reinforcing every response every time they occur. Although continuous reinforcement schedules create a memorability of a subject’s response, the memory does not last for long unless partial reinforcement comes into application. Additionally, partial support proves suitable for application at the organization, for it prevents employees from reaching reward satiation points immediately after the identification of desirable behavior. Partial support manages to have long-lasting impressions on a subject when little or no continuous support is applied because it creates psychological frustrations.
References
Cherry, K., and Susman, D. (2020). Reinforcement Schedules And How They Work. [Online] Verywell Mind. Available at: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-schdule-of-reinforcement-2794864
Olson, M. H., &Hergenhann, B.R. (2011). An introduction to theories of personalities (8th Ed.).Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall/ Pearson education.ISBN-13: 9780205798780