Alfred University psychology professor uses a game to encourage productive student behavior

Educators often complain about students’ use and abuse of cell phones in classrooms; Alfred University Associate Professor of Psychology Beth Johnson decided that students themselves could be part of the solution.

Johnson wanted to demonstrate how classroom management could dovetail with learning opportunities. Her operating principle: Encouragement and rewards work better in modifying disruptive behavior than discouragement and punishment.

She has been developing a teaching practice that aims to reduce distraction and facilitate learning course content while fostering a positive classroom climate. The first test of the idea was a 2019 policy she developed for her course Principles of Learning and Behavior Modification. The goal of the policy was the prevention of unauthorized cell phone use during class.

She began by creating a game that uses a point system, adding or subtracting points from students' participation score for the class based on their successful compliance with her “no phones out” policy. The game progressed over the semester to become increasingly cooperative, until students were working together toward shared outcomes: A single student’s individual behavior would lead to a point awarded or deducted from every student’s participation points for that day. Sometimes it was for extra credit, and sometimes it was a regular point.

Basically, if all the students in a single class refrained from the unauthorized use of a cell phone during a single class period, all the students received a point award. Likewise, if a single student was observed using a cell phone during the class period, the entire class suffered the loss of a point.

However, the ultimate objective of the game was not mere classroom management; the deeper purpose was for students to learn in a classroom setting the principles of behavior modification as it applied to them personally. The class monitored its own performance in abiding by the no-cell phone policy. Students also were tested on the underlying learning and behavior modification principles of the policy for their mid-term and final exams. Johnson wanted to make her cell phone policy, as well as its success or failure, a part of the class content.

“Cell phones are usually distractions in a class,” she explains. “Given my goal to eliminate, or reduce, distractions, I didn’t want the policy to become a source of distraction itself. So, I incorporated the effort to reduce cell phone use into the course content itself. … I wanted to minimize disruption by incorporated the policy into the class content whenever possible, so that enforcing the policy didn’t derail the class.”

The results were unambiguously positive: A marked decline in students’ use of cell phones. And – although Johnson says she cannot draw a clear connection – test scores “significantly improved compared to the previous semester.”

The emergent pandemic in the spring of 2020 disrupted Johnson’s effort to repeat the experiment. However, she is applying the idea of gamifying course policy to two classes she currently is teaching: Human Sexuality and Social Psychology. This time she is using the same bonus point system to encourage students’ use of face masks, in keeping with the university’s policy of requiring face masks during in-class instruction.

Johnson says that, divorced from the applied learning of principles of behavior modification, the game is more narrowly about classroom management. She also notes there are still two months remaining in the semester, and the campus policy on masks will probably change. Any change in the campus mask policy will affect how her class policy and game plays out.

Early considerations of her preliminary 2019 data nevertheless indicate a useful takeaway for other educators (and the parents of their students). Behavior is complex, and changing it takes careful planning and challenging simplistic assumptions about rewards and punishments. Nevertheless, as the old adage says, honey attracts more bees than vinegar.