Reinforcement and punishment in education: what are they and how are they used?

In everyday life, it is also useful to know how to encourage certain behaviors and discourage others.

All the things we do, we do them because they have worked for us before. That is, if I am a person who shouts at my peers, it is because at some point I learned that I can get some benefit from shouting. On the contrary, if I am a passive person, tending to avoid conflict, it will be because at some point I will have learned that shouting does not provide me with benefits, or else it provides me with greater harm..

However, behaviors that have always provided me with benefits may cease to do so when the context changes. For example, in my high school class, I may have been able to deal aggressively with my classmates because that's how they did my homework, but I may encounter other types of people when I get to college who are less vulnerable to my aggressiveness (or more aggressive). In that case, I will have a serious problem, because I will have run out of behavioral resources to deal with that aspect of my life.

Therefore, for an educator it is of vital importance to to pay close attention to what is and what is not being reinforced.For this reason, it is vital for an educator to pay close attention to what is and what is not being reinforced, since early behaviors will evolve over time and, without proper guidance during growth (which will not always exist), we may find ourselves with adults who respond "like children" to their social situations.

Punishments and reinforcements to educate

First of all, it is necessary to clarify the importance of the contingencies between behaviors and consequencesThe use of contingencies between behaviors and consequences, especially at very early ages, in which basic mental processes such as thinking, memory or language are in early stages of development and, therefore, will not be as effective as an educational tool.

Organisms establish behavioral patterns through the consequences that follow them. If the result of a behavior facilitates the repetition of that behavior in the future, it is called reinforcement. and if, on the contrary, it decreases its probability of occurrence, we will call this consequence: punishment.

From this we deduce that the same consequence, in different people, may or may not be a reinforcement or a punishment. For example, taking away television time may be a punishment for one child, but not for another. Sending a child to his room can be a reinforcer if what is in the room pleases the child (toys, video game consoles...), and a congratulation or a smile of approval can be a sufficient reinforcer (or maybe not).

The need for coherence between school and society

We must know our audience very well, and exercise good contingency between the behaviors displayed and the consequences we administer. And in this sense, we must be very careful about what behavior we want to establish. Congratulation is a social reinforcer for the majority of children and when, for example, we instinctively say "Very good!" to a child for whatever he or she does, we may fall into the trap of not reinforcing the child's activity so much as the call for attention.

This can lead to an association between self-esteem and social reinforcement, which can lead to seeking that self-esteem in the approval of our physical appearance, economic level, likes on Instagram and other banalities that society tends to reinforce (through fiction, advertising, etc.).

Another example is given in the case of "snitches". In a society that increasingly encourages social responsibilityand encourages us to get involved in cases of gender violence (calling the police when we hear screams in the house next door) or fraud (whether by a company or an individual), the classroom culture is still, on many occasions, that of sanctioning the snitch when he or she warns us that Fulanito has copied or Menganita has hit Zutanita.

The importance of encouraging appropriate behavior

Without going into which social model is the most appropriate, the incoherence between a society that, through the school, educates in a value (silence) that it does not consider desirable in the society to which its children will be incorporated, and that it will try to modify through campaigns, etc., is striking.

Reinforcements and punishments operate continuously in the educational context.It is vitally important to detect which behaviors we are reinforcing and which we are not, as well as what it means to reinforce these behaviors in the face of the society into which these citizens in formation will be incorporated, because whether we like it or not, childhood and adulthood are nothing more than arbitrary conventions, and from the moment we are born until we die, we are nothing more than people in development.