A comparison of presession and within-session reinforcement choice.
Let clients pick their reinforcer right before delivery—within-session choice beats presession choice at boosting response rates.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested two ways to let kids pick their reinforcer.
Presession choice: pick once at the start of work time.
Within-session choice: pick right before each reward.
They used a concurrent-operants setup with kids who had developmental delays or ADHD.
Each child worked under both conditions in an alternating-treatments design.
What they found
Kids worked much harder when they chose the reward right before getting it.
Within-session choice doubled or tripled response rates compared to presession choice.
The boost showed up quickly and stayed strong across sessions.
How this fits with other research
Stasolla et al. (2013) backs this up. They used assistive tech to let nonverbal kids with cerebral palsy make choices during therapy.
Their kids also showed big gains in engagement and happiness, even though the tools were different.
Bacon et al. (1998) used noncontingent escape instead of choice. Both papers help kids with developmental delays, but theychoice timing vs. free breaks.
Davison et al. (1995) warns that adult programs rarely use research-based tactics like these. This gap makes the current finding even more urgent for daily practice.
Why it matters
You can boost work rates today by letting clients pick their reward right before delivery. No extra cost, no new toys—just better timing. Try it during discrete trial or task completion blocks and watch the numbers climb.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Single- and concurrent-operants procedures were used to evaluate the effects of two reinforcement conditions on the free-operant responding of 3 individuals with developmental disabilities and 1 with attention deficit disorder. In the presession choice condition, prior to each session the participant chose one item from an array of three different highly preferred stimuli. This item was delivered by the experimenter on each reinforcer delivery during that session. In the within-session choice condition, each reinforcer delivery consisted of placing an array of three different highly preferred stimuli in front of the participant, who was allowed to select one. Only one of the two reinforcement conditions was in effect for any particular session in single-operant phases. Buttons associated with each reinforcement condition were present, and the participant could allocate responses to one or the other in concurrent-operants phases. Data showed substantially more responding to the button associated with within-session choice than presession choice during concurrent-operants phases. This effect was not as apparent during single-operant phases, suggesting that a concurrent-operants procedure provided the more sensitive evaluation of within-session and presession reinforcer choice effects.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1999 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1999.32-161