I moved in with my roommate, Jaelyn, last July into our apartment in Iowa City, we were both attending the University of Iowa in the fall. School started a few months ago and as time has progressed and the classes got harder and more tedious, I started to notice some weird study behaviors from Jaelyn. The worst study behavior I saw from Jaelyn was everytime her phone went off she would drop whatever she was studying at the moment and check her phone as well as continue to be on her phone another ten minutes before returning to studying. This behavior occurred every time her phone got any type of notification while she was studying, this was a type of operant behavior or a behavior that can be controlled by a negative or positive consequence. Jaelyn also had good study habits as well. For example, everytime Jaelyn had a free period she would go back to her dorm to study.
For my Psychology class I decided to do an experiment with my roommate using a method called Operant conditioning where a behavior is changed by adding or taking away a positive or negative reinforcement or adding a positive or negative punishment. Jaelyn has kept the bad studying habit of being on her phone for months now and I was going to try to get her to change her habit. I was going to break the habit using negative punishment, where a favorable stimulus is removed to lessen the chance of a behavior occurring again.
Every day since the start of the school year, Jaelyn would ask me every night when she was done studying if she could borrow my dvd player to watch a movie before bed and I always told her yes. I decided that every time I saw Jaelyn pick up her phone while studying and it not being more than a half hour before the last time she picked up her phone that I was going to tell her she couldn’t use my dvd player that night. The first night Jaelyn was on her phone the whole time so I told her that I wasn’t allowing her to use my dvd player.
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The next night she stayed off of it a total of twenty minutes before I proceeded to tell her again that she wasn’t using my dvd player that night either, the next day Jaelyn stayed off her phone the whole night and didn’t pick it up once while studying so I rewarded her with allowing her to use my dvd player that night,this was an example of a fixed-interval schedule which means the behavior is only reinforced after a certain amount of time has passed for example, Jaelyn got rewarded if she didn’t use her phone for more than 30 minutes.
The following night she checked her phone while studying and she once again had the privilege of using the dvd player taken away from her. Jaelyn did not like the fact she couldn’t borrow the dvd player now. The last day she stayed off her phone entirely again while studying and was once again allowed to borrow the dvd player. Jaelyn now realized if she wasn’t on her phone while studying that it meant she would get to use the dvd player and if she was on her phone that it would get taken away. Jaelyn now never checks her phone until after she is done studying.
As mentioned before, Jaelyn has good study habits too. Instead of leaving and going out with friends during her free period she always took that time to study for upcoming exams or finish any assignments due for class. I wanted to encourage Jaelyn to keep up the good behavior. I am going to use a method called positive reinforcement where you add something desirable to a behavior to increase the likelihood of it happening again. I decided that I was going to go buy a bag skittles which was Jaelyns all time favorite candy.
Everytime I come home and see Jaelyn studying in her room before her next class, I give her a handful of skittles. Jaelyn now comes home and studies whenever she gets the chance at all just to get her handful of skittles, this has allowed her to spend more time studying and preparing for exams which results in better grades. Joey, who is a member of Jaelyn’s study group sees what Jaelyn was offered for doing the homework and studying and how much her grades improved so now he studies everyday as well.
There are many other types of learning other than Operant Conditioning. For example, Vicarious Conditioning is when you learn how to respond to a stimulus based on how other people react to the stimulus. A good way of using vicarious conditioning to change Jaelyn’s behavior would be having jaelyn watch a fellow student receive a bad grade and getting yelled at which scares Jaelyn and tells her it is not a good idea to receive a bad grade. The last type of learning is through observational learning. Observational learning is learning by observing others. I could use observational learning to stop the bad habit of jaelyn on her phone by having her watch the study habits of straight A students and showing her how they focus on studying without using their phones at all.
