This paper discusses how the "at risk" and "what works" approach that drives the management of youth criminal justice systems produces little knowledge that informs practitioners how best to work with young people who offend and how to design effective crime prevention programmes. An alternative approach that is more informative for the…

Zentall and Singer (2007) challenge our conclusion that the work-ethic effect reported by Clement, Feltus, Kaiser, and Zentall (2000) may have been a Type I error by arguing that (a) the effect has been extensively replicated and (b) the amount of overtraining our pigeons received may not have been sufficient to produce it. We believe that our…

"JEAB"'s first decade featured control of individual behavior by operant contingencies, where the experimenter could interact with a subject in real time and obtain fairly immediate evidence of control, with the possibility of direct extension to applied settings. In subsequent decades, emphasis shifted toward long-term parametric studies with…

When the Commission on Children At Risk--a group of 33 children's doctors, research scientists, mental health and youth service professionals--presented to the Nation its report on the crises of deteriorating mental and behavioral health of children in the US, the 83-page report was entitled "Hardwired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for…

Biology teachers know how important it is for them and for their students to engage first-hand with nature. Ideally, bringing students to fields, woodlands, and wetlands to observe, explore, and wonder is the best way to stimulate curiosity and practice scientific inquiry. However, for many reasons, field excursions are not always practical or…

The contributions of Joseph V. Brady to behavioral pharmacology span more than 50 years and range from early studies using the Estes-Skinner ("conditioned emotional response") procedure to examine drug effects and various physiological processes in experimental animals to the implementation of mobile methadone treatment services and to small group…

This account describes the total reengineering of an organization with the attendant changes to the culture, the nature of the work, the rethinking of the organizational purpose, and the identification of a new customer base and new concepts of how the organization will reach it. The case is presented not as scientific research but as a case of…

Four bonobos, seven gorillas, and six orangutans were presented with two small rectangular boards on a platform. One of the boards had a piece of food under it so that it acquired an inclined orientation whereas the other remained flat on the platform. Subjects preferentially selected the inclined board. In another experiment, subjects were…

B. F. Skinner and T. N. Whitehead recalled a personal interaction in 1934, with differing memories of the event. No evidence of other subsequent interactions or mutual citations has been found. Although they went their separate ways, three similarities in their research strategies have been found and are discussed. Elements of Whitehead's…

Adelaide Zoo, already home to 3,400 animals representing nearly 300 species of exotic and native mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, just acquired a new specimen: Homo exhibitionist. For 28 days, four sets of six volunteers get to spend a week living the life of an animal, foraging and playing and partying like it's 1999 million years ago. The…

Poverty remains an urgent crisis worldwide. In the United States, 28.6 million children live in low-income families and 12.7 million children live in poor families. In nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 47 million children live below national poverty lines. These figures pertain to…

When the errors in an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression model are heteroscedastic, hypothesis tests involving the regression coefficients can have Type I error rates that are far from the nominal significance level. Asymptotically, this problem can be rectified with the use of a heteroscedasticity-consistent covariance matrix (HCCM)…

College instructors are increasingly relying on wireless clicker systems as instructional tools in the classroom. Instructors commonly use clicker systems for such classroom activities as taking attendance, giving quizzes, and taking opinion polls. However, these systems are uniquely well suited for the teaching of psychology and other courses…

For much of his career, B. F. Skinner displayed the optimism that is often attributed to behaviorists. With time, however, he became less and less sanguine about the power of behavior science to solve the major problems facing humanity. Near the end of his life he concluded that a fair consideration of principles revealed by the scientific…

Success in any organization may depend on changing the behavior of stakeholders to meet new challenges. But humans have brains designed to register change as threat, and thus they often cling to old habits and mindsets. Recent breakthroughs in brain research provide a fresh alternative to both behavioral and humanistic approaches to organizational…