Centennial Honors College
Western Illinois University
Undergraduate Research Day 2012
Poster Presentation
To Shop or Not to Shop?
Ashley Vargas
Faculty Mentor: Mary Jensen
Special Education
In my one of my special education classes, I’ve been learning about student’s behavior
and how hard it is to actually change a student’s negative behavior into a positive
behavior. For this project, I wanted to see what it would be like to take a self-behavior of
my own, that’s considered a negative behavior, and transform it into a new positive,
target behavior. My self-behavior that I partake in a lot is online shopping, and being a
non-working college student money is tight at the moment. To keep me from online
shopping, I set up a forty-five minute workout schedule that I will do three times a week
for twelve weeks. To reinforce myself to stay on track, anytime I get the urge to go
online to shop I put a dollar in my “Money I Could Have Blown Shopping” jar. I will
document my progress on a calendar to see if I followed my workout schedule three
times a week, and if I got the urge to shop online. My poster presentation will document
the progress I made towards achieving my goal.