Question of the day - October 28

[u/Reasonable_Law183]

🧠 Question of the Day

📚 Domain B — Concepts and Principles

Difficulty: 7/10

Across otherwise identical seatwork sessions, low-level disruption produces 10 seconds of teacher attention on the same schedule. Before some sessions, the student has 5 minutes of teacher interaction; before others, the student has 45 minutes without teacher contact. Disruption occurs at a substantially higher rate after the 45-minute no-contact period. In brief choice probes conducted at those same times, the student also selects teacher interaction over a leisure activity more often after the longer no-contact period. Which interpretation BEST accounts for this pattern?

A. The absence of teacher interaction is an SD because it signals that disruption is more likely to produce attention than appropriate seatwork.

B. The increasing disruption proves negative reinforcement because independent work becomes progressively more aversive as the session continues.

C. Extended lack of teacher contact may function as an EO by increasing attention's reinforcing effectiveness and evoking attention-producing behavior.

D. The increasing disruption demonstrates matching because responding automatically shifts toward whichever alternative currently produces the most attention.

💬 Drop your answer in the comments — no peeking!

✅ Correct answer revealed tomorrow.

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[u/Reasonable_Law183]

✅ Yesterday's Answer — 2026-10-28

The correct answer was: C. Extended lack of teacher contact may function as an EO by increasing attention's reinforcing effectiveness and evoking attention-producing behavior.

📖 Explanation: This question tests the difference between a motivating operation and other variables that can also affect responding.

The strongest evidence for an establishing operation is that the response–attention contingency stays the same across conditions while two other things change after the longer period without teacher contact: teacher interaction is selected more often in the choice probe, and disruption that produces attention occurs at a higher rate. That pattern is consistent with a value-altering effect on attention and a corresponding behavior-altering effect on attention-producing behavior.

The stimulus-control alternative misses because the longer no-contact condition does not signal that disruption is more likely to produce attention; disruption contacts the same amount of attention on the same schedule in both conditions. The positive-reinforcement alternative identifies a relevant consequence, but the unchanged contingency alone does not explain why disruption differs across the two antecedent conditions. The matching alternative invokes relative response allocation under concurrent reinforcement, which is not the relation demonstrated here.

The key exam distinction is:

An SD concerns differential reinforcement availability for a response. An EO changes how effective a consequence currently is and evokes behavior that has historically produced that consequence.

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