The use of positive reinforcement in conditioning attending behavior.
Half a course point reliably made college students turn their webcams on.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The researchers wanted to see if a tiny reward could make college students turn on their webcams during online class.
They gave half a course point each time a student showed their face on camera.
The class switched back and forth between weeks with the point and weeks without it.
What they found
Webcam use went up when the half-point was available.
It dropped again when the points stopped.
A short reminder or a long reminder made no difference—only the point mattered.
How this fits with other research
Clark et al. (1970) got the same kind of boost with deaf children using candy and tokens instead of points. The idea—reward looking at the teacher—works across ages and reinforcers.
Alba et al. (1972) later showed that tying the whole course grade to lecture attendance kept university students coming. Hart et al. (1968) proves the tiny end of that scale: even half a point still works.
Bailey et al. (1970) sent rewards home through daily report cards. Both studies move the contingency away from the teacher’s hand, showing remote delivery can still shape classroom behavior.
Why it matters
You do not need big prizes or candy to change college behavior. A sliver of credit, delivered right away, can pull students into view on Zoom. Try adding a micro-point to any online response you want—chat comments, poll clicks, or camera on. You will know within one class if it is worth keeping.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
During the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person classroom instruction was placed on hold and university courses transitioned to online instruction. This transition resulted in novel challenges for instructors, including reduced professor-student interactions due to limited student webcam usage. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of a reinforcement contingency on students' use of webcams during synchronous online instruction. An alternating treatments design was used to assess the impact of a reinforcement contingency consisting of 0.5 points contingent on daily webcam usage. We also assessed the results based on how the contingency was communicated to the students (a verbal statement on the daily quiz plus a reminder on lecture slides versus a statement on the lecture slide only). The reinforcement contingency reliably increased webcam usage, but there was not a significant difference in results as a function of how the presence of the reinforcement contingency was communicated. These findings suggest that the behavior of using webcams can change with a simple reinforcement contingency.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1968 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1968.1-245