Changing Criterion Design

CHANGING CRITERION DESIGN

John likes playing pc games a lot and sometimes he omits to do his homework and even his chores at home while playing games and this has led to poor performance in school alerting the parents on how serious the situation is and they want john to change his behavior. This is one area where changing criterion design is applied, to change an existing behavior it establishes a series of criteria for the target performance, then tracks how closely changes in performance follow those changes in criteria and the intent of the experiment is to increase or decrease the behavior in successive intervals until the desired behavior is achieved by using presentation of reinforcement. In this type of design the criterion for reinforcement is changed throughout the experiment. According to behaviorist including Bf Skinner, all behavior in human and non- human is caused, shaped and maintained by its consequences. The basic steps used in implementing changing criterion design are explained in the example below.

judas is a high school student who, unfortunately, is quite overweight; therefore,

as part of his physical education class, he is involved in a speed walking program. judas,

however, is less than a speed walker; in fact, he moves at a snail's pace regardless of the

encouragement that he receives from his peers and the instructor. The instructor decides that he

needs to be more systematic in his program and that he should build judas's speed in

small increments, starting with a relatively slow walking speed and moving through

several steps in which speed is steadily increased. He fits judas with a pedometer and

begins collecting baseline data on his steps per minute. After about 6 days, when the

baseline data are relatively stable, the coach sets a steps-per-minute criterion for judas

that is 15% above his average baseline speed. He picked that criterion based on his

professional judgment regarding what he felt judas could likely achieve in a first effort.

He then implements the intervention with sub phase 1 in which he tells judas that,

whenever the criterion is met, he can have 10 minutes to engage in one of his highly

preferred activities, punching the punching bag. judas fails to meet the criterion on the

first day of the intervention, but meets it on the following 3 days. Next, the instructor introduces sub phase 2 in which he increases the criterion by 15% of the average of