Behavior principles

Exert from preface: "In an educational environment, it is hoped that as teaching experience and feedback on the adequacy of the teaching material increase, better methods of aiding learning will evolve. The development of more efficient teaching techniques often requires a revision of the materials used previously. We hope that the changes we have made represent our productive interactions with our students. The goals of this text are not substantively different from those of the first edition. The basic design still incorporates the features we believe necessary for the student to become proficient in analyzing man's complex interation with his natural environment. We have carefully evaluated the effect of Behavior Principles on students during the past couple of years. Out intial thoughts on evaluating its impact centered on designing experiments to test their grasp of the material. After some thinking, it became clear that the more productive course of action was to describe the student's behavior in the course in detail. We felt that a longitudinal evaluation of the individual student's progress would provide us with the kind of data needed for our analysis. At the start of our evaluation, we needed to define where we thought we wanted students to be at the end of their study. We immediatly agreed that it was not sufficient for the student simply to be able to repeat technical definitions and examples that were provided in the text. We felt that by the end of the course we wanted the student to be able to analyze fluently the world about him with the technicaltools and at the level of analysis provided him in Behavioral Principles. Technically, this is related to the fact that an operant performance is defined by its consequences on the environment."