The Use of Secondary Reinforcement in Teaching Inner-City School Children

For a number of years we have been experimenting with the effects of re-wards on classroom learning. We have found the classroom to be a satisfactory laboratory, particularly with slow-learning and mentally re-tarded pupils. It is our belief that when there is greater recognition that the classroom can be an excellent place for experimentation, and when rigor-ous experimental conditions are per-mitted and encouraged, the progress of psychological research and educa-tional practice will be accelerated, and there will be less reliance on pedagogical philosophies and meth-ods which are subjectively based upon authority or fad. A number of studies will be re-ported here which illustrate the thesis that the classroom can serve as an educational laboratory. These studies concern the school achievement of retarded and culturally-deprived stu-dents.’ Study 1: Competition as motivation Harris (1958) carried out one of our first experiments in the controlled use of secondary reinforcement in class-room learning. The independent vari-able was the learning of spelling. The motivation was competition, certainly one of the most important of learned human drives. The children in the ex-periment had been classified as &dquo;mentally handicapped.&dquo; The motiva-tion of competition has not often been used with such children in academic 1 Dr. Concetta V. Romanow participated in guid-ing Studies 1, 2, and 3, which were conducted by