Interactions between teacher guidance and contingent access to play in developing preacademic skills of deviant preschool children.
Layer brief teacher prompts on top of token reinforcement when you teach tough preacademic skills to little kids.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Weisman et al. (1976) tested a token economy in a preschool class. Kids earned tokens for finishing preacademic tasks. Tokens bought play time and snacks. The team used an ABAB reversal design. First they ran tokens alone. Then they added brief teacher guidance for a second group.
What they found
Tokens alone doubled, then tripled, task completion. When teachers added short prompts and praise, gains jumped again. The boost was biggest on hard tasks like sorting shapes or counting sets.
How this fits with other research
Mann et al. (1971) showed the same pattern in older kids. Their tokens plus praise lifted work output and accuracy. The gains stuck even after tokens stopped.
Lydersen et al. (1974) flipped the focus. They paid tokens for accurate reading, not quiet sitting. Disruption fell to near zero. Together these studies say: reward the skill you want, and behavior problems fade.
Bickel et al. (1984) extended the idea. They let kindergarten peers hand out the tokens. Disruptive behavior still dropped. The message: tokens work even when kids run the system.
Why it matters
If you run a preschool or early-childhood room, pair your token board with quick, clear teacher prompts. Save the combo for the hardest tasks. You should see faster mastery and less problem behavior without extra planning time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Token-mediated access to play and snacks was made contingent on completion of academic tasks in the Baseline Experiment. This contingency produced stable completion rates that were subsequently doubled, and then tripled, for four deviant children in a special preschool. A reversal design demonstrated that the contingency was functional in maintaining the children's rates of task completion. The Guidance Experiment examined the role of a social event, teacher guidance, in the acquisition of task-completion skills, in a multiple-baseline-across-tasks design (with reversals). The analysis demonstrated that teacher guidance was an important supplement to the token-mediated contingency in establishing significant increases in task completions for a second group of three deviant children in the special class. The importance of teacher guidance was related to the difficulty level of the children's tasks.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1976 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1976.9-85