The Learning course normally carries an enrollment of not more than twenty-five students and incorporates a laboratory component which stresses active learning and process-skill education. Laboratory exercises target such specific goals as the development of general observational and descriptive research skills, demonstrated skills in animal response shaping, and participatory involvement in human verbal learning replications of landmark phenomena such as the serial-position and CVC-meaningfulness effects. All labs require typed written reports in APA format.

The Learning course was selected as the test vehicle for contingency contracted learning because such a contract offers unique opportunities to merge normally abstract coverage of behavioral principles with a self-evident project-level application. However, such a contract is equally well suited for use in any other course. It is just that the contract so nicely articulates this course's subject matter that the contract enhances the Learning course, not vice versa. In order to use the contract as content expression, introduction of the contract comes just after mid-term. Thus, this particular course is informally blocked into three fairly distinct mechanical phases, including precontract, contract negotiations, and contract implementation.
 
 

Course Phase I: Pre-Contract
The first phase of the course uses a lecture /discussion format, supplemented with in-class and out-of-class laboratory exercises, to develop specific content knowledge and process. Content covered includes a general introduction to scientific philosophy and experimental procedures, the character of respondent/ reflexive behavior, and general operant conditioning principles, including response shaping, schedules of reinforcement, extinction, stimulus generalization and discrimination, and general issues of applied behavioral analysis.

During this first phase, students produce laboratory reports on behavioral observation and taxonomic behavioral coding, elicitation analysis of reflexive responding, and response shaping (students work in pairs to shape a rat to press a bar for water reinforcement). Also, during this phase students take at least two, and occasionally three, 70-minute in-class exams based on the Word Associate Test's (Verplanck, 1992) minimally-prompted recall format. Grades for this phase are determined by five 10-30 point lab reports plus these two or three exams. Exams are typically worth approximately 160- 165 points each.

The end of this first phase and the beginning of a second is marked by students beginning to work on a ten-references-minimum term paper intended to review one specific topic of their choice concerning the human application of learning principles covered in the course to date.
 

Course Phase II: Contract Negotiations
While students are working on their topical review term papers, most of the class-assigned readings and lectures are suspended. Class time for this approximately two-week period is spent exploring issues in token economy program development and implementation, in conducting a behavioral task analysis of all potential student behaviors, in considering how one might operationalize measurement of such student response categories, and, finally, how such activities relate concretely to possible contract construction.
 

Through a presentation and discussion format, students are led to collectively generate a complete specification of all possible behaviors a student can exhibit that might be desirable and task-oriented with respect to learning. After generating a relatively comprehensive listing of behaviors appropriate to each of several alternative student environments, including class, domiciles, laboratories, and other (like the library, applied settings, etc.), we then begin to place these behaviors on a continuum which defines the successive approximations, from most simple to most complex/difficult, suited for response shaping procedures. The outcome typically resembles the summary presented in Table 1.

As Table I suggests, the simplest behavior appropriate to a classroom might merely be a student's physical presence (attending class). Next on the continuum might be paying attention to activities going on within the class (operationalized by taking notes that appropriately describe the process and/or content). Next might be asking questions, which is generally viewed as being simpler than answering questions (which can be made less or more difficult by whether voluntary answering or random selection for requested answering is involved). Students can easily work their way up to the point where they begin to appreciate the difficulty in assuming full responsibility for teaching a class on any given day, as the instructor must do for every class meeting.

Similar successive approximation scales are generated for "ideal student" behavioral shaping in various outside -of class settings as well. These settings include laboratory, reading-related settings, and a general category described as "other." Behaviors appropriate for these various settings typically include reading and note-taking, making up practice test questions, taking practice tests constructed by study partners, engaging in social study groups, seeking out and abstracting topically relevant journal articles in the library, writing lab reports, and engaging in field trips and demonstration labs (see Table 1 for a systematic listing).

The most complex form of behavior on such a continuum is always the professional behavior modeled by professors, whether that behavior focuses on research, writing and publication, rendering professional services, community and collegial service, or teaching. At this juncture the relation between well-designed curricula and a student's gradual development into a more and more sophisticated content-and-skill expert is discussed, with upper-division courses and graduate school anticipated as the probable developmental environments for the advanced behaviors on this continuum.

After such continua are constructed, class discussion focuses on relative response costs implied by engaging in such behaviors and appropriate reward levels sufficient to encourage student development along any or all of these scales up to some aspired level. Gradually, a token-economy system is collaboratively developed which relies upon points that may eventually be accumulated and traded for a guaranteed letter grade for the course. This token point system stresses a cafeteria style behavioral selection system which specifies certain required behaviors for each supportive setting, plus various elective behaviors from the more complex levels associated with any one or more of these settings.

Eventually, everything the class has discussed is summarized on paper in the form of a proposal for changing the way the course is taught. This "contract" is offered to any student who desires to experience a behavioral management system. This usually, but not always, translates into those students who have had difficulty with the course to date (as evidenced by their mid-term letter-grade).

Letter grades in the course were, for many years, established by an informal curving procedure. All points from assignments and tests were accumulated and a percentage of earned/available points was calculated at the end of phase 11 (roughly mid-term) to determine letter-grade cutoffs on the curve and to afford students an evaluation of their standings immediately prior to contract offerings. Over a period of several course offerings, this curve was found to be sufficiently stable to suggest that a fixed grading scale, based on these previous data, should be established. Grades on this fixed scale are still determined by totaling all points and calculating a percent age of earned/ available. Point-to-letter conversion uses the following scale: 96-100 = A, 94-95 = A-, 9293 = B+, 89-91 = B, 87-88 = B-, 84-86 = C+, 76-83 = C, 73-75 = C-, 71-72 = D+, 67-70 = D, and 65-66 = D- Anything below 65 is an F. Class attendance was never required, but missed tests could not be made up.

Working under the contracted conditions for changing the structure of how the final portion of the course is managed is totally the student's choice, as is the letter grade to which each individual aspires. We typically spend one final day negotiating changes in the written contract's details, then the group-defined contract is formally offered to each student individually as an option for any student desiring a fresh start and a guaranteed grade (based on successful completion) at course's end.
 

Course Phase III: Contracting
Full contract details are too expansive to include within the space of this article, but interested readers may contact the author for both a course syllabus and full specifications. The critical summary details in this contract include:

1. Students have the option of (a) continuing the remainder of the course under the same rules that have been in effect throughout the previous two phases of the course (no required attendance, the collection of lab reports, term paper, and test performance determine grades) or (b) contracting for a known grade (either A, B or C for the entire course (according to a token economy system which reinforces a wide variety of student behaviors across multiple settings using a point system).

2. Students who contract to obtain sufficient points for a grade of either A, B, or C have the additional option of making up all deficiencies in the quality of their previous performances to meet their new contracted grade standards. As an alternative to such performance make-ups, students may have their mid-term grade averaged with the contract grade earned during phase III.

3. Students who choose to contract earn points from a diverse behavioral menu which incorporates a variety of settings, including test taking. Cumulative point-token accounting is each student's personal responsibility, using a form especially designed for this purpose (see Appendix A). Individual student accountings are verified on a random "spot-check" basis periodically after class.

4. Any students failing to meet contract standards by the scheduled final exam are exposed to a "slip-clause" which significantly reduces their letter grade, or, if they miss their criteria by more than 15%, they fail the course.