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Kaylee Ables
Dr. VanAuken
PSYC 207: Lifespan Development
7 March 2014
Saint Adalberts Elementary
For my first observation this semester I observed young children at Saint Adalberts
Elementary. Saint Adalberts Elementary is located right here in South Bend at 519 South Olive
Street. Saint Adalberts Elementary is a predominately Spanish speaking community, many of
the teachers speak Spanish and the majority of the students’ first language is Spanish. I
volunteer at Saint Adalberts Elementary every Monday and Wednesday from 3 O’clock to 4:20
for the Title One program. The Title One program is a tutoring program for the students that are
on the lower ends of their class and have received the lowest test scores in their classes. The
class that I volunteer to help with are the first and second grader students whose ages range from
five to eight. There are a total of ten students in the class, 3 of them are girls and 7 of them are
boys.
When I am at Saint Adalberts Elementary School with the children I do several activities
with the students. In general the majority of the time I watch and assist them on different
activities that deal with reading, writing, and spelling. We do different reading and
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comprehension cards, have spelling bees, do writing activities such as writing stories about the
seasons, and play certain games that help with the students’ vocabulary. However I not only
observe the children while they are learning, I also observe the children interact with each other
outside of the classroom before tutoring begins and I observe the way the teachers interact with
the children as well throughout my time at the school.
The topic that I chose to focus on for my observations over the weeks was discipline.
Discipline is very important in school for young children because it teaches them how to follow
the rules and it teaches them important lessons in life. The way that the classroom I volunteer in
does discipline is by using a point system. Originally when I began volunteering at Saint
Adalberts we used a point system within teams. This means that we split the ten students up into
three groups and the group that earned the most points over two weeks received a prize, usually
candy, at the end of the weeks. The students could gain points for their team by helping out the
teacher, being polite, raising their hand before speaking, having good handwriting, cleaning up
trash, and many other ways. Not only could the students gain points for their given team, but
they could get points taken away from their team. After doing this system for several weeks
during the Title 1 program, we decided to switch to an individual point system. This individual
point system is different from the team point system because the students were only relying on
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themselves for points and at the end of every week the students with the top three highest points
received a prize.
I noticed that when the students were in the teams and were relying on each other for
good behavior less points were given. I think this was due in part to some students relying on
the others to gain points so they were just sitting back and watching. This could be similar to the
bystander effect. The bystander effect is when individuals will not offer any help to a victim if
others are around because they assume that someone else is already doing so. This can be
connected to some of the students not working to receive points because they believe that the
other students will simply gain the points for the team by themselves. Once the system was
switched to a more individualized system a majority of the children were working very hard and
behaving very well in order to gain points.
This type of discipline can also be called reinforcement which is a part of operant
conditioning. Reinforcement is defined as anything that makes a response more likely to happen
in the future and this has been proven to be a powerful tool in development. In this case of
working at Saint Adalberts Elementary the reinforcement the children were receiving was points
in order to receive candy. This type of reinforcement is positive reinforcement because when a
point was given after a response, the response is more likely to happen in the future. Therefore
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if a child raised his hand before answering a question they would receive a point and in the future
they would raise their hand. Not only was reinforcement used, but punishment was also used in
the classroom. Punishment refers to a decrease in behaviors when an unpleasant response
follows the behavior. By using the point system, the taking away of points would be the
punishment aspect. The unpleasant response, taking away points from an individual or a team,
would decrease the unwanted behavior, talking without raising a hand.
The idea of operant conditioning, the use of consequences to modify or shape voluntary
behavior or actions, worked very well in the classroom of first and second graders. Their
behavior was very good when we threatened to take away points from them or their team or we
suggested that by performing good behavior we would reward them with points. For the
majority of the students the point system produced good behavior, but there is always that one
exception. There is one boy student in the class who seems to not care about the points and the
operant conditioning technique is not working as well for him. I agree that through punishment
and reinforcement a person’s behavior can be shaped and changed, however I don’t believe it
works for everyone the same exact way; different reinforcements and punishments work better
for some kids than others.