Parental educational involvement conceived as the arrangement of contingency operations

This study explored the utility of a conception of parental educational involvement as the arrangement of contingency operations that normatively change: the frequency of children’s school‐related behaviour, the reinforcing potency of stimuli produced by studying, and children’s tendencies to request parental intervention. A child‐report measure of parental contingency use was developed and administered to 1520 schoolchildren (Grades Four to Six). An exploratory factor analysis revealed three internally consistent dimensions of parental practices: use of punishment and negative reinforcement contingencies; use of positive reinforcement contingencies; and non‐responsiveness to children’s requests for educational intervention. Frequencies of use of punishment/negative reinforcement contingencies and of parental non‐responsiveness were inversely correlated with use of positive reinforcement contingencies and with teacher’s reports of children’s achievement. These scales might therefore identify parents whose current educational practices are likely to be less than optimally effective, so that they might be helped to intervene more beneficially in their children’s academic affairs.     

Book reviews

Educational technology research and development -     

Instructional development as a social movement: An illustration of analogical theorizing

Instructional development, a service activity in which a faculty member and an instructional designer work in close cooperation to redesign an existing course or to design a new one. represents the typically elusive subject of educational research: a human process. This article examines the application of naturalistic inquiry to such a research topic and suggests that such inquiry needs to be informed by research traditions in sociology and anthropology that have long used these methods. Drawing on social-movement theory, an example is presented of analogical theorizing, illustrating how socialmovement theory developed in other areas can be applied to the exploration of instructional development.     

Timing processes in the reinforcement-omission effect

A comparison was made of the effects of long-term exposure to fixed-interval reinforcement with unsignaled and with signaled reinforcement omissions. When successive fixed-interval cycles ended in reinforcement, subjects showed a clear “scalloped” response pattern. When reinforcement was omitted, but a brief signal was given in lieu of reinforcement, responding in the next cycle started earlier than it did after reinforcement. When reinforcement was omitted without exteroceptive cues, response rates peaked near the time of reinforcement and then declined to a flat but substantial level. The classicreinforcement-omission effect was observed, in that total responding was greatest after uncued omission, somewhat less after cued omission, and least after reinforcement. However, response rate plotted as a function of time showed that the uncued-omission condition had a very different function from that of the cued-omission or reinforcement conditions. A failed-discrimination account of the omission effect might accommodate the three functions if the discrimination is considered to be a temporal one. The temporal-discrimination account argues that high-rate responding reflects the accumulation of subjective time proximal to the memory of the time of reinforcement. The accumulation resets completely with food reinforcement, incompletely with cues in lieu of reinforcement, and not at all in the absence of cues.