Editor's comment: Reinforcements, tangible or not, motivate performance. When learning results, reinforcements are “instructional materials.” The teacher usually commands a wide range of reinforcements from candy to stars on a chart. The following article reports on the use of a “stars-on-a-chart” type of reinforcement in motivating the work performance of adolescent, trainable mentally retarded. Though the authors, here, are more concerned with commercial than academic work, their study does provide a model for classroom use. Their success in evaluating small changes in the work behavior of trainable adolescents suggests the potential of the author's approach for evaluating the small increments of change which occur in the special classroom and underscores the need to do so. (J.J.McC.)
Jens et al. (Sat,) studied this question.