Free or Low-cost Reinforcers for Appropriate Behavior

This book focuses on reinforcers (non-tangible) you can use with students within the classroom setting or a whole school setting. They can be used at the universal, targeted, or tertiary levels. This is based on research conducted since 2004. We asked students of all ages this question, "What would mean the world to you? What could an adult do to let you know you had done a good job?" We wrote down their answers and categorized them first by age level. We later read the book "The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace" by Chapman and White (2012) and considered their results and decided to see if the student answers broke into similar categories. We did find categories; however, they were not the same as the adults. Interestingly, only one student in all the years has ever named anything tangible. It was a fifth-grade girl who said, "Food would be nice." We discovered her mother sold the weekend backpack for drugs and she did not eat from Friday afternoon till Monday morning. The school was working with the Division of Family Services to remedy the situation at the time.