Revisiting Reinforcement: A Focus on Happy, Relaxed, and Engaged Students

TE A C H IN G E xc ep ti o na l C hi ld re n, V o l. 55 , N o . 1 , p p . 7 2 – 74 . C o p yr ig ht 2 0 22 T he A ut ho r( s) . D O I: 10 .11 77 /0 0 4 0 0 59 9 22 11 23 18 5 Research and practice in applied behavior analysis (ABA) have contributed to the education of students with autism and other intellectual or developmental disabilities in school settings across a wide variety of efforts, including but not limited to, academic instruction (Delano, 2007), addressing behaviors restricting a student’s environments and opportunities (e.g., aggression; Santiago et al., 2016), and schoolwide positive behavior supports (Carr et al., 2002). One significant contribution of ABA is the process for identifying what motivates student learning in order to develop individualized approaches for teaching and intervention. In behavior-analytic terms, we refer to the events motivating learning as “reinforcers” and to the process by which those events engender new skills as “reinforcement.” In everyday terms, it is useful to think of reinforcers as events that contribute to a learner becoming and staying happy, relaxed, and engaged (Hanley, 2021). The language of “happy, relaxed, and engaged” is a useful heuristic to guide decisions about what to incorporate into reinforcement contexts and may be helpful in updating what we contemporarily consider educationally meaningful reinforcers.