During the summer months, you fi nd employment in a camp for mildly mentally impaired children. As a counselor you are asked to supervise a small group of children, as well as to look for ways to improve their attention to various camp activities that take place indoors (e.g., craft-making and sewing). You decide to explore the possibility of using a system of rewards (M&M candies) for “time on task.” You realize that the camp director will want evidence of the effectiveness of your intervention strategy as well as some assurance that it will work with other children in the camp. Therefore you are to

A. Plan an intervention strategy based on reinforcement principles that has as its goal an increase in the time children spend on a camp activity.

B. Explain what behavioral records you will need to keep and how you will determine whether your intervention has produced a change in the children’s behavior. You will need, for example, to specify exactly when and how you will measure behavior, as well as to justify your use of a particular design to carry out your “experiment.”

C. Describe the argument you will use to convince the director that your intervention strategy (assuming that it works) will work with other, similar children.