A teacher wants her students to study steadily across the semester. What kind of schedule of reinforcement could she put her quizzes on in order to produce a steady rate of responding, and explain why this schedule would be more successful than the other schedules of reinforcement?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Include the use of pop quizzes that would put the students on a variable interval schedule in which they would not know the day of the week that a quiz might occur and would have to study each night before the class. A variable interval would produce a steadier rate of responding as opposed to the scheduled quizzes, which are on a fixed interval schedule and tend to result in students studying only the night before the scheduled quiz. Thus, instead of the student studying only once every two or three weeks on a fixed interval schedule, they would be studying at least two or three times per week with a variable interval schedule. Interval schedules are usually used for tests, rather than ratio schedules, since tests must occur after a passage of lecture time.