Cognitive behavior modification: "Motivated learning" reading treatment with parents as therapy-technicians

Abstract

The present experiment was an attempt to discover whether parents of children with reading deficits could act successfully as therapy-technicians in helping their own children to overcome these deficits. Four children identified as reading problems were reinforced for appropriate reading behaviors with tokens backed up by monetary value. All four children showed a positively accelerated rate of reading and made from 36.389 to 64.448 single word reading responses during the 30 to 45 hours of training. Pre- and post-test comparisons indicated a significant increase (at the .01 level) in ability to read the training materials. Results add to confidence in learning conceptions of human behavior.