Reseaxh in Developmental Disabilities, Vol. 13, pp. 301-307, Printed in the USA. All rights reserved.
1992
0891-4222/92
$5.00 + .oO
Copyright Q 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd.
SOFTWARE REVIEW SECTION
Review of Behavior on 43 Disk From CMS Academic Software: Instructional Programs for Teach ing Teachers James A. Mulick Depanment
of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University and The Children’s Hospital, Columbus, OH
Have you ever tried to describe a complicated diagram or an attractive color to someone over the telephone? Apart from resembling a problem posed by a Zen Master, this is more or less what it is like to try to impart the technique of shaping behavior with positive reinforcement (Skinner, 1951) to a would-be teacher using words alone. Words don’t capture the interactive flow of events, the critical limits of timing, and the disruptive effects of poor technique on the learner. It became commonplace long ago to advise beginning students of psychology to “Go get yourself a rat” so that the selective action of reinforcement on behavior could be experienced directly by the student in a teaching situation. Using positive reinforcement to generate novel and adaptive behavior is an important part of early childhood education and special education, and the art of teaching via positive reinforcement remains a skill that requires much practice to master. Until now there has been no practical alternative but to advise the student teacher to “Go get yourself a child” to enable the student teacher to gain the necessary experience. The question of just who was shaping who remained a problem. The author and Human Requests Psychology,
was supported during preparation of this review in part by U.S. Department of Health Services MCH Special Project MCJ 009053 and NICHD Grant #HD23042-03. for reprints should be sent to James A. Mulick, Department of Pediatrics, Division of The Ohio State University, 700 Children’s Drive, CHPB-4, Columbus, OH 43205.
301
302
Review of Behavior on a Disk
The obvious technological answer is computer-assisted simulation. Graphics capabilities are now well developed for all PCs and can provide smooth animation. The personal computer can handle split-second timing and record user actions for later review and analysis. The most ubiquitous examples of these capabilities are arcade games, racing simulators, and flight simulators available right off the rack wherever software is sold. Simulators are used in other types of training, such as the proper handling of military hardware or new aircraft and experimental vehicles, areas of application where predictable mistakes with the actual hardware during the early stages of learning would be absolutely intolerable. Other uses of computerized simulation include the ability to isolate, simplify, speed up, or slow down natural processes that would be difficult to perceive in the natural world. A good example of this form of instructional software is the excellent simulation of the process of natural selection and evolution that can be purchased from the publisher to illustrate points made by Richard Dawkins (1987) in his superb book The Blind Watchmaker. With this Macintosh computer-based simulation, the student can create “biomorphs” through selective “breeding” of stick figure drawings differing by as many as 16 genes or “physical” parameters, including line length, bilateral or radial symmetry, mutation size and rate, body segmentation, and so forth. This evolution program compresses “geological time” so that the student can see the effects of random, partially constrained, or selective combinations of the 16 characteristics across generation after generation. The outcomes are wonderful, sometimes beautiful, and convey a feel for the way evolution actually works to create diversity of form in the living world. Behavior on a Disk (BOAD), version 2.0, contains a collection of simulations of learning and the selective action of positive reinforcement on behavior. Examples include bar pressing by rats, verbal behavior, errorless transfer of stimulus control, and even personal goal setting. The authors, A. Charles Catania, Byron A. Matthews, and Eliot Shimoff. know a thing or two about learning and have produced simulations that work in terms of the natural phenomena they tried to isolate for the student. The programs run on garden variety IBM PC and MS-DOS compatible computers with CGA graphics and an optional printer, and are distributed on 5.25” (ISBN o-922077-20-7) or 3.5” (ISBN o-922077-21-5) media. Although copy protected to prevent unlawful duplication, the retail price per disk of only $8.95 (student disk and g-page manual) means that everyone can have a personal copy for a refresher course whenever necessary. The disks were developed for classroom use in psychology at the college level, but the user need not be a college student to learn some important things about behavior from this product. Instructors adopting the disks (as they would a textbook) for a course can get a “master copy” of the student disk with
Review of Behavior on a Disk
303
which they can replace (i.e., copy onto blank media) student disks that are accidentally damaged. My review was completed with a very “bare bones” Tandy 1400LT portable running MS-DOS 3.02 and a Kodak Diconix portable inkjet printer. I did this because I wanted to determine the value of this product in settings without access to late model desktop hardware, such as field settings in preschools, institutions, and private homes, where people have a practical need to improve their understanding of basic learning principles. The graphics look better on a CRT screen, but the laptop’s backlit liquid crystal display was adequate for all the modules and animation. I examined the demonstration disk supplied by the distributor, CMS Software, and the student disk. The major instructional modules are identical and will be described for the student version. PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
AND EVALUATION
With DOS running, the user simply types BOAD at the A>; prompt and the initialization begins. This includes a fust time personalization of the student disk by recording the user’s name and social security or other code number on the disk so that printed progress reports of modules completed can be identified individually. The instructional modules can’t be run until this information is recorded on the student disk. The programs must be run from the designated “A drive.” The main menu allows the user to select any of the instructional modules, check progress on all the modules, print a progress report, and exit to DOS. The user is returned to the main menu whenever exiting from an interactive program module. The instructional modules include several simulations of the effects of positive reinforcement. There is a basic Shaping Game, in which the student must deliver food pellets to a hungry (but easily satiated) image of a rat for pressing down on a bar with sufficient force. As one with a personal history of actual “hand shaping” laboratory rats, I can affm that the simulation feels right in many ways. The rat approaches the task with a tendency to emit bar presses at variable amounts of force, and the correctly timed delivery of food, by pressing the spacebar, alters the probability of particular (and adjacent) amounts of force. Extinction can occur if deliveries are too slow or too infrequent. The level of difficulty can be set at Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard levels, in which parameter tolerance is altered. In a dozen tries I got up through Hard successfully, but I needed to practice more to master Very Hard - incidentally, I shifted to autoshaping procedures almost exclusively in the animal lab after my second year of graduate school. The Distribution Game involves another simulated rodent,
304
Review ofBehavior on a Disk
but this time the task is to move the location of his nose poking from the left to the extreme right of the display. This exercise impressed me greatly. The display shows histograms depicting the probability that the mouse will poke at a particular point along the X-axis. The probability distribution changes upward for correctly timed reinforcer deliveries at the point the mouse appeared and at adjacent points, but remains unchanged at other points. Nonreinforcement reduces response probability, depicted by a slight decrease in the height of the probability histogram at the point the mouse appeared and a short distance on either side (a simulated generalization gradient). Delayed reinforcement results in a slight reduction of all histograms, conveying the idea that moving away from the goal had been reinforced. This demonstration is a wonderful way to show students the interaction of changing relative response probabilities as a result of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. The Goal Setting simulation demonstrates the importance of gradually increasing criteria for reinforcement, using a student’s study time as the example. If the goal is set too ambitiously, the student gives up; if too slow, the final goal is not achieved. The Threshold simulation is similar but involves a weight-lifting primate who must reach a maximum amount of weight. Both simulations show the student how gradual increments lead to success and further demonstrate that progress can be recovered by decreasing the goal slightly (but not too much) if failure occurs as a result of too rapid an increase in demand level. These are important points, but I found the challenge to be small. Perhaps the level of difficulty would be greater for beginning students. Verbal Shaping involves a depressed patient who must be shaped by an apparent Rogerian therapist to emit positive statements. Too little or poorly selected encouragement, and the patient becomes suicidal; too much, and the patient gives up on the therapist because the therapist is agreeing “with everything” that is said. This simulation is slick and useful. There is an optional “expert” feature, in which the patient’s statement is evaluated by an expert. I did not need this additional feedback to progress quickly through the session to a “cure,” but the strategy of shifting from initially reinforcing statements like “I feel a little sad” to more neutral and then later only really positive statements might be challenging for a student. The natural tendency of many people is to attend to negative statements more than to positive ones, and this simulation is a nice lesson in how dangerous and counterproductive that can be. The Verbal Learning demonstration is a good experience for students who have trouble conceptualizing stimulus control. In the context of a twochoice discrimination, the student first is reinforced for selecting “B” rather than “A,” but by the end of the sequence is selecting “I” rather than “B.”
Review of Behavior on a Disk
305
The fading procedure used transfers control, with few errors for most people, from the initial letter, through male names, and eventually to the new letter discrimination. This type of sequence of letter discriminations leading to word discriminations has been used in classroom demonstrations of transfer of stimulus control for years; the version on BOAD is a welcome addition. Other modules include Memory Span, illustrating the limits of immediate recall as a function of letter sequence length and context (i.e., letters in meaningful words), and Problem Solving, in which the student is asked to solve a series of liquid volume problems by spilling the liquid from one of three containers to the others. These are sound demonstrations and have the strength of using the student’s own behavior as the data to illustrate the learning phenomena under discussion. They are better suited to the classroom than to the field, where the relationship of these modules to practical teaching problems may be harder to grasp. Another module involves submodules in which the student gets practice in Matching Cumulative Records with key-presses, Discriminating Schedule Performances from examples of cumulative records in a multiple choice format, and Identifying Schedule Contingencies from the direct experience of key pressing. These obviously cover critical variables in behavior analysis, but the presentation is geared to the laboratory. Few teachers or parents will, without guidance, see the direct relationship between what they learn from these modules to everyday experience. A bonus program, run from the A> prompt by typing VOCAB, gives the student practice selecting correct definitions of behavioral terms. Errors are followed by correct feedback. The student receives credit for each set of vocabulary words (A - M) when an 80% correct criterion is reached. The score is recorded on the disk. The definitions are tied to a recent learning textbook by Catania (1984). DOCUMENTATION The documentation consists of a very simple and fairly uninformative, 5.25” square, user’s manual of nine pages in length. The manual describes each module in brief and tells you enough to get the programs running on most machines; at least, if you know how to identify the A drive and get the operating system running to the point of receiving an A> prompt back from the machine. The user who has trouble with this or ruins the disk is advised to consult an “instructor.” I would have liked to know more about the behavioral data that went into the various parameter selections that must have been made by the authors in developing some of the simulations. Even if the disk is to be used in a learning course, this kind of information would be of value to instructors.
306
Review of Behavior on a Disk
RECOMMENDED
AUDIENCE AND LIMITATIONS
The disk is meant for use in a college level learning course. It would be a valuable adjunct to reading and lecturing in such a course, and it may represent a partial substitute for some otherwise costly laboratory experiments, I feel the product would be of significant value to consultants and staff trainers working in classrooms and institutions and to professionals working directly with parents. Much misunderstanding of the intent and implementation of various behavioral procedures could be avoided if direct caregivers and parents could experience a simulation of the teaching procedures they were being asked to use. This use would, however, be an adaptation of this software product; and some of the graphics (e.g., apes and rodents) might even be considered offensive by some potential users in an extended audience. The authors might consider altering the graphics, and even excluding some less obviously practical demonstrations, on a separate edition of BOAD for a broader, nonstudent audience. The authors certainly seem to have the basic parameters in most of the simulations down pat. It is actually fun to run some of the shaping simulations. These simulations could, with a few cosmetic changes, have wide appeal to applied behavior analysts and community-based professionals who must teach others to carry out behavioral programs. Interacting with these programs is much more “instructive” than a lecture, a book, or even a demonstration about the same phenomena. SUMMARY
The programs on BOAD represent a set of useful simulations and demonstrations of learning phenomena that successfully convey important practical and theoretical information to students. The most successful modules deal with shaping and the selective effect of positive reinforcement on behavior. The range of examples is sufficiently broad to convey the generality of these learning phenomena, but the graphics and particular examples are better suited to the college classroom (for which they were developed and in which they have received extensive field testing) than to the general public, where some users might be distracted by working with simulated animal “subjects” or bored by the simple graphics. There is a separate application on the disk that drills students on behavioral vocabulary, a useful resource for helping to assure that behavioral issues are discussed using consistent terminology. Although a single disk is initialized for a single user so that individual progress can be tracked accurately in printed reports, the cost of a disk is so low that no student who needs to learn about teaching would be discouraged from purchasing it. In truth, this is the best deal in instructional software I have seen yet.
Review ofBehavior
on a Disk
307
REFERENCES Catania, A. C. (1984). Lenming (2nd ed.). New York: Prentice-Hall. Dawlcins, R. (1987). The blind watchmaker.New York: W. W. Norton. Skinner, B. F. (1951). How to teach animals. Scientific American, 185,26-29.
TITLE:
VERSION REVIEWED: AUTHORS: PUBLISHER:
DESCRIPTION:
PRICE: HARDWARE REQUIRED: FORMAT: DOCUMENTATION:
USERS:
Behavior on a Disk Version 2.0 A. Charles Catania, Byron A. Matthews, and Eliot Shimoff CMS Academic Software PO. Box 729 Ellicott City, MD 21045 301-465-660!4 A menu-driven set of useful simulations and demonstrations of basic learnh~g phenomena Simulations of shaping and the selective effects of positive consequences on behavior are especially effective. A separate vocabulary drill application for behavioral terms is included. Data on student performance is stored on disk and can be printed. $8.95 per copy of noncopyable disk and manual. May be ordered through a college bookstore by ISBN number. IBM PC or compatible computer with MS-DOS; a printer is optional. One 5.25” (ISBN O-922077-20-7) or 720k 3.5” (ISBN O922077-21-5 diskette. A small format, 9-page user guide provides simple descriptions of each module and basic start up information for users who know how to run programs from MSDOS. College instructors, inset-vice trainers, and consultants who need to teach others basic operant conditioning techniques, stimulus control, schedules of reinforcement, and basic behavioral terms.
1992
0891-4222/92
$5.00 + .oO
Copyright Q 1992 Pergamon Press Ltd.
SOFTWARE REVIEW SECTION
Review of Behavior on 43 Disk From CMS Academic Software: Instructional Programs for Teach ing Teachers James A. Mulick Depanment
of Pediatrics, The Ohio State University and The Children’s Hospital, Columbus, OH
Have you ever tried to describe a complicated diagram or an attractive color to someone over the telephone? Apart from resembling a problem posed by a Zen Master, this is more or less what it is like to try to impart the technique of shaping behavior with positive reinforcement (Skinner, 1951) to a would-be teacher using words alone. Words don’t capture the interactive flow of events, the critical limits of timing, and the disruptive effects of poor technique on the learner. It became commonplace long ago to advise beginning students of psychology to “Go get yourself a rat” so that the selective action of reinforcement on behavior could be experienced directly by the student in a teaching situation. Using positive reinforcement to generate novel and adaptive behavior is an important part of early childhood education and special education, and the art of teaching via positive reinforcement remains a skill that requires much practice to master. Until now there has been no practical alternative but to advise the student teacher to “Go get yourself a child” to enable the student teacher to gain the necessary experience. The question of just who was shaping who remained a problem. The author and Human Requests Psychology,
was supported during preparation of this review in part by U.S. Department of Health Services MCH Special Project MCJ 009053 and NICHD Grant #HD23042-03. for reprints should be sent to James A. Mulick, Department of Pediatrics, Division of The Ohio State University, 700 Children’s Drive, CHPB-4, Columbus, OH 43205.
301
302
Review of Behavior on a Disk
The obvious technological answer is computer-assisted simulation. Graphics capabilities are now well developed for all PCs and can provide smooth animation. The personal computer can handle split-second timing and record user actions for later review and analysis. The most ubiquitous examples of these capabilities are arcade games, racing simulators, and flight simulators available right off the rack wherever software is sold. Simulators are used in other types of training, such as the proper handling of military hardware or new aircraft and experimental vehicles, areas of application where predictable mistakes with the actual hardware during the early stages of learning would be absolutely intolerable. Other uses of computerized simulation include the ability to isolate, simplify, speed up, or slow down natural processes that would be difficult to perceive in the natural world. A good example of this form of instructional software is the excellent simulation of the process of natural selection and evolution that can be purchased from the publisher to illustrate points made by Richard Dawkins (1987) in his superb book The Blind Watchmaker. With this Macintosh computer-based simulation, the student can create “biomorphs” through selective “breeding” of stick figure drawings differing by as many as 16 genes or “physical” parameters, including line length, bilateral or radial symmetry, mutation size and rate, body segmentation, and so forth. This evolution program compresses “geological time” so that the student can see the effects of random, partially constrained, or selective combinations of the 16 characteristics across generation after generation. The outcomes are wonderful, sometimes beautiful, and convey a feel for the way evolution actually works to create diversity of form in the living world. Behavior on a Disk (BOAD), version 2.0, contains a collection of simulations of learning and the selective action of positive reinforcement on behavior. Examples include bar pressing by rats, verbal behavior, errorless transfer of stimulus control, and even personal goal setting. The authors, A. Charles Catania, Byron A. Matthews, and Eliot Shimoff. know a thing or two about learning and have produced simulations that work in terms of the natural phenomena they tried to isolate for the student. The programs run on garden variety IBM PC and MS-DOS compatible computers with CGA graphics and an optional printer, and are distributed on 5.25” (ISBN o-922077-20-7) or 3.5” (ISBN o-922077-21-5) media. Although copy protected to prevent unlawful duplication, the retail price per disk of only $8.95 (student disk and g-page manual) means that everyone can have a personal copy for a refresher course whenever necessary. The disks were developed for classroom use in psychology at the college level, but the user need not be a college student to learn some important things about behavior from this product. Instructors adopting the disks (as they would a textbook) for a course can get a “master copy” of the student disk with
Review of Behavior on a Disk
303
which they can replace (i.e., copy onto blank media) student disks that are accidentally damaged. My review was completed with a very “bare bones” Tandy 1400LT portable running MS-DOS 3.02 and a Kodak Diconix portable inkjet printer. I did this because I wanted to determine the value of this product in settings without access to late model desktop hardware, such as field settings in preschools, institutions, and private homes, where people have a practical need to improve their understanding of basic learning principles. The graphics look better on a CRT screen, but the laptop’s backlit liquid crystal display was adequate for all the modules and animation. I examined the demonstration disk supplied by the distributor, CMS Software, and the student disk. The major instructional modules are identical and will be described for the student version. PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
AND EVALUATION
With DOS running, the user simply types BOAD at the A>; prompt and the initialization begins. This includes a fust time personalization of the student disk by recording the user’s name and social security or other code number on the disk so that printed progress reports of modules completed can be identified individually. The instructional modules can’t be run until this information is recorded on the student disk. The programs must be run from the designated “A drive.” The main menu allows the user to select any of the instructional modules, check progress on all the modules, print a progress report, and exit to DOS. The user is returned to the main menu whenever exiting from an interactive program module. The instructional modules include several simulations of the effects of positive reinforcement. There is a basic Shaping Game, in which the student must deliver food pellets to a hungry (but easily satiated) image of a rat for pressing down on a bar with sufficient force. As one with a personal history of actual “hand shaping” laboratory rats, I can affm that the simulation feels right in many ways. The rat approaches the task with a tendency to emit bar presses at variable amounts of force, and the correctly timed delivery of food, by pressing the spacebar, alters the probability of particular (and adjacent) amounts of force. Extinction can occur if deliveries are too slow or too infrequent. The level of difficulty can be set at Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard levels, in which parameter tolerance is altered. In a dozen tries I got up through Hard successfully, but I needed to practice more to master Very Hard - incidentally, I shifted to autoshaping procedures almost exclusively in the animal lab after my second year of graduate school. The Distribution Game involves another simulated rodent,
304
Review ofBehavior on a Disk
but this time the task is to move the location of his nose poking from the left to the extreme right of the display. This exercise impressed me greatly. The display shows histograms depicting the probability that the mouse will poke at a particular point along the X-axis. The probability distribution changes upward for correctly timed reinforcer deliveries at the point the mouse appeared and at adjacent points, but remains unchanged at other points. Nonreinforcement reduces response probability, depicted by a slight decrease in the height of the probability histogram at the point the mouse appeared and a short distance on either side (a simulated generalization gradient). Delayed reinforcement results in a slight reduction of all histograms, conveying the idea that moving away from the goal had been reinforced. This demonstration is a wonderful way to show students the interaction of changing relative response probabilities as a result of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. The Goal Setting simulation demonstrates the importance of gradually increasing criteria for reinforcement, using a student’s study time as the example. If the goal is set too ambitiously, the student gives up; if too slow, the final goal is not achieved. The Threshold simulation is similar but involves a weight-lifting primate who must reach a maximum amount of weight. Both simulations show the student how gradual increments lead to success and further demonstrate that progress can be recovered by decreasing the goal slightly (but not too much) if failure occurs as a result of too rapid an increase in demand level. These are important points, but I found the challenge to be small. Perhaps the level of difficulty would be greater for beginning students. Verbal Shaping involves a depressed patient who must be shaped by an apparent Rogerian therapist to emit positive statements. Too little or poorly selected encouragement, and the patient becomes suicidal; too much, and the patient gives up on the therapist because the therapist is agreeing “with everything” that is said. This simulation is slick and useful. There is an optional “expert” feature, in which the patient’s statement is evaluated by an expert. I did not need this additional feedback to progress quickly through the session to a “cure,” but the strategy of shifting from initially reinforcing statements like “I feel a little sad” to more neutral and then later only really positive statements might be challenging for a student. The natural tendency of many people is to attend to negative statements more than to positive ones, and this simulation is a nice lesson in how dangerous and counterproductive that can be. The Verbal Learning demonstration is a good experience for students who have trouble conceptualizing stimulus control. In the context of a twochoice discrimination, the student first is reinforced for selecting “B” rather than “A,” but by the end of the sequence is selecting “I” rather than “B.”
Review of Behavior on a Disk
305
The fading procedure used transfers control, with few errors for most people, from the initial letter, through male names, and eventually to the new letter discrimination. This type of sequence of letter discriminations leading to word discriminations has been used in classroom demonstrations of transfer of stimulus control for years; the version on BOAD is a welcome addition. Other modules include Memory Span, illustrating the limits of immediate recall as a function of letter sequence length and context (i.e., letters in meaningful words), and Problem Solving, in which the student is asked to solve a series of liquid volume problems by spilling the liquid from one of three containers to the others. These are sound demonstrations and have the strength of using the student’s own behavior as the data to illustrate the learning phenomena under discussion. They are better suited to the classroom than to the field, where the relationship of these modules to practical teaching problems may be harder to grasp. Another module involves submodules in which the student gets practice in Matching Cumulative Records with key-presses, Discriminating Schedule Performances from examples of cumulative records in a multiple choice format, and Identifying Schedule Contingencies from the direct experience of key pressing. These obviously cover critical variables in behavior analysis, but the presentation is geared to the laboratory. Few teachers or parents will, without guidance, see the direct relationship between what they learn from these modules to everyday experience. A bonus program, run from the A> prompt by typing VOCAB, gives the student practice selecting correct definitions of behavioral terms. Errors are followed by correct feedback. The student receives credit for each set of vocabulary words (A - M) when an 80% correct criterion is reached. The score is recorded on the disk. The definitions are tied to a recent learning textbook by Catania (1984). DOCUMENTATION The documentation consists of a very simple and fairly uninformative, 5.25” square, user’s manual of nine pages in length. The manual describes each module in brief and tells you enough to get the programs running on most machines; at least, if you know how to identify the A drive and get the operating system running to the point of receiving an A> prompt back from the machine. The user who has trouble with this or ruins the disk is advised to consult an “instructor.” I would have liked to know more about the behavioral data that went into the various parameter selections that must have been made by the authors in developing some of the simulations. Even if the disk is to be used in a learning course, this kind of information would be of value to instructors.
306
Review of Behavior on a Disk
RECOMMENDED
AUDIENCE AND LIMITATIONS
The disk is meant for use in a college level learning course. It would be a valuable adjunct to reading and lecturing in such a course, and it may represent a partial substitute for some otherwise costly laboratory experiments, I feel the product would be of significant value to consultants and staff trainers working in classrooms and institutions and to professionals working directly with parents. Much misunderstanding of the intent and implementation of various behavioral procedures could be avoided if direct caregivers and parents could experience a simulation of the teaching procedures they were being asked to use. This use would, however, be an adaptation of this software product; and some of the graphics (e.g., apes and rodents) might even be considered offensive by some potential users in an extended audience. The authors might consider altering the graphics, and even excluding some less obviously practical demonstrations, on a separate edition of BOAD for a broader, nonstudent audience. The authors certainly seem to have the basic parameters in most of the simulations down pat. It is actually fun to run some of the shaping simulations. These simulations could, with a few cosmetic changes, have wide appeal to applied behavior analysts and community-based professionals who must teach others to carry out behavioral programs. Interacting with these programs is much more “instructive” than a lecture, a book, or even a demonstration about the same phenomena. SUMMARY
The programs on BOAD represent a set of useful simulations and demonstrations of learning phenomena that successfully convey important practical and theoretical information to students. The most successful modules deal with shaping and the selective effect of positive reinforcement on behavior. The range of examples is sufficiently broad to convey the generality of these learning phenomena, but the graphics and particular examples are better suited to the college classroom (for which they were developed and in which they have received extensive field testing) than to the general public, where some users might be distracted by working with simulated animal “subjects” or bored by the simple graphics. There is a separate application on the disk that drills students on behavioral vocabulary, a useful resource for helping to assure that behavioral issues are discussed using consistent terminology. Although a single disk is initialized for a single user so that individual progress can be tracked accurately in printed reports, the cost of a disk is so low that no student who needs to learn about teaching would be discouraged from purchasing it. In truth, this is the best deal in instructional software I have seen yet.
Review ofBehavior
on a Disk
307
REFERENCES Catania, A. C. (1984). Lenming (2nd ed.). New York: Prentice-Hall. Dawlcins, R. (1987). The blind watchmaker.New York: W. W. Norton. Skinner, B. F. (1951). How to teach animals. Scientific American, 185,26-29.
TITLE:
VERSION REVIEWED: AUTHORS: PUBLISHER:
DESCRIPTION:
PRICE: HARDWARE REQUIRED: FORMAT: DOCUMENTATION:
USERS:
Behavior on a Disk Version 2.0 A. Charles Catania, Byron A. Matthews, and Eliot Shimoff CMS Academic Software PO. Box 729 Ellicott City, MD 21045 301-465-660!4 A menu-driven set of useful simulations and demonstrations of basic learnh~g phenomena Simulations of shaping and the selective effects of positive consequences on behavior are especially effective. A separate vocabulary drill application for behavioral terms is included. Data on student performance is stored on disk and can be printed. $8.95 per copy of noncopyable disk and manual. May be ordered through a college bookstore by ISBN number. IBM PC or compatible computer with MS-DOS; a printer is optional. One 5.25” (ISBN O-922077-20-7) or 720k 3.5” (ISBN O922077-21-5 diskette. A small format, 9-page user guide provides simple descriptions of each module and basic start up information for users who know how to run programs from MSDOS. College instructors, inset-vice trainers, and consultants who need to teach others basic operant conditioning techniques, stimulus control, schedules of reinforcement, and basic behavioral terms.
