Author Archives: Kiana A Keiper

Shaping and successive approximation

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It’s that time of year again when people are getting antsy for the warm weather to finally stick and summer to roll around. During the summers in high school I would lifeguard for our local pool and a few years ago I started giving swim lessons to certain swimmers who came to the pool and would show up a few hours earlier in the morning to improve their skills. The younger age groups were always my favorite. While learning about operant conditioning, particularly the processes of shaping and successive approximation, it brought back memories of teaching the kids how to swim better. Our textbook gives the example of circus trainers getting their animals to do all of their tricks by starting with a behavior the animal is already capable of doing and then increasing the level of the exercise little by little until they reach the ultimate goal. After completing each step the trainer would use some type of positive reinforcement like giving a treat to the animal before moving on to the next step, keeping the animal in good spirits. Eventually they would reach the final goal of performing the trick.

Similarly, we relied on shaping and successive approximation when giving the swimmers lessons. We would start in the shallow end where they were most comfortable and just practice some breathing exercises that they were already capable of doing. Following that we would throw a bunch of diving sticks and toys to the bottom of the shallow end so that once again they could practice the act of dunking themselves under water and holding their breath for a longer period of time to retrieve the sticks; whoever got the most sticks would win a gold star for that round. Our main goal was to get them used to being underwater for a longer period of time so that they could eventually swim in the deep end without any kind of floaties or help from an adult. By increasing the depth of the water every few feet and playing the game each time the students became more and more comfortable with their swimming and eventually would reach the deep end without even noticing how deep they really were. By incorporating the diving sticks and gold stars as positive reinforcers the students stayed determined and interested in continuing their lessons and their skills would increase along the way without them even noticing.

Proper ways to study

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Being a student in college is a hard task, especially when it comes to tests and exams. Every few weeks there is usually a new cycle of exams or if you’re like me, you have at least one or two exams a week, which can get be difficult to keep up with. Learning a large abundance of new information in five maybe six different classes at once makes it very hard to store this information into your memory. This is where knowing proper ways to study really pays off. As stated in lecture, students who are looking to improve their grades and decrease their stress levels should understand distributed practice and maintenance rehearsal; that is “Studying 1 hour each night for 5 nights is better than studying 5 hours in 1 night” (Wede). Maintenance rehearsal can be defined as the practice of saying some information to be remembered over and over in one’s head in order to maintain it in short-term memory. With new exams coming week after week, being able to recall this information from your short-term memory due to maintenance rehearsal is much easier than trying to memorize all the test information in one sitting. Also, if this information is rehearsed long enough it can in fact end up being stored in your long-term memory, which really pays off on those comprehensive exams at the end of the semester.

When learning about these studying methods and how it affects your grades I immediately thought of my roommate. My roommate likes to do a million things at once, so when it comes to exams she usually loses focus on preparing ahead and tends to work on other class material until the night before her exam and then realizes she has to get all her studying done in one night. Not only does this push her stress level through the roof but she ends up being more focused on the time constraint than her test material. This lack of focus and time affects how the information is being processed in her memory and also doesn’t allow much rehearsal like the distributed practice method of studying does. Without rehearsal the information doesn’t stay in the memory as long and therefore is harder to recall on the test. Her most recent exam ended up being on a week where she didn’t have that much other class work and she was able to start studying earlier in the week for her exam. She found that when she started studying earlier and got to review the material a little bit each day before the exam, her grade improved dramatically. Personally I think every student will see just how much knowing these proper study methods would help.

Naturalistic Observations

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As far as descriptive research goes, naturalistic observation should provide the truest results based on how that observation is conducted compared to the others such as laboratory observation, case studies, and surveying. Naturalistic observation has the huge advantage of gathering information from people in their natural settings; you are able to watch people’s real behavior for research.

Throughout high school I used to lifeguard at our city pool. In the beginning of each summer we would run some tests on the new swimmers who signed up for swim lessons.  Our goal was to separate the swimmers not by age but by ability. Since the population we observed was usually a group of younger kids ranging from 5-8 years old, we would observe how they swam with just the instructor there compared to swimming with the rest of the group with only the lifeguards watching.  One of the major disadvantages of naturalistic observation is that if people know they are being watched, they will change their behavior. So, by putting kids in the natural setting (the pool with the other kids in their age group with the lifeguard watching like normal) versus having the swimmer swim for the instructor (swim in front of someone they know is testing them for swim lessons), we were able to see their true abilities.

Our results consistently showed that without the pressure of the instructor watching them swim, they performed much better in a natural setting with their peers in front of the lifeguard as they normally would in the pool. If we would have solely went off the results of their swimming performance in front of the instructor, we wouldn’t have been able to split up the swimmers as much as we would have liked to based on ability. This goes to show that compared to laboratory observation, naturalistic observation provides the better result because it is based on someone’s normal behavior.