PSYC 320 Week 7 Behavior Modification Project: PowerPoint Example

Behavior Modification Project PowerPoint: Raising Daily Study Time From 26 to 66 Minutes, Seven Slides With Speaker Notes and Two Responses

Slide 1: Raising Daily Study Time

• Behavior Modification Project, PSYC 320
• Target: minutes of focused study per day
• Self-management with a contingency contract

Speaker notes: My project targeted something many students struggle with: putting off studying. I counted how many minutes I spent each day working at my desk on course material with the phone out of reach, measured with a timer, and I used a self-management program to increase it.

Slide 2: What the Research Says

• Delayed rewards and impulsiveness drive procrastination (Steel, 2007)
• Interventions reduce procrastination, CBT most strongly (van Eerde & Klingsieck, 2018)
• Recorded, shared progress improves goal attainment (Harkin et al., 2016)
• If-then plans boost goal attainment, d = 0.65 (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006)

Speaker notes: Research describes procrastination as a problem of delayed rewards competing with immediate ones. Interventions can help, and two techniques in particular, monitoring progress where it can be seen and forming specific if-then plans, have strong support. My treatment combined them with a contract that made a reward immediate, following the reinforcement principles in Miltenberger (2015).

Slide 3: Baseline Phase

• Fourteen days, no intervention
• Mean 26.1 minutes, median 27.5, range 0 to 60
• Zero on a Friday and a double-shift Saturday
• Phone checks ended most study bouts

Speaker notes: The graph on this slide shows the fourteen baseline days, with days on the horizontal axis and minutes on the vertical axis. The line jumps around but stays low, and I never reached half of my goal. My notes showed that long workdays and my phone were the biggest obstacles.

Slide 4: Treatment Phase

• Posted progress graph and weekly report to a partner
• If-then plans, including a lunch-break plan for busy days
• Desk for study only; phone kept in the car
• Contract: evening gaming earned by meeting the goal

Speaker notes: Treatment began on day 15. The goal was 60 minutes in the first week and 90 in the second, with 20 minutes on Fridays and double-shift days. The graph adds the treatment phase after a dashed phase-change line, with each week's goal shown as a dotted line.

Slide 5: Summary of Results

• Treatment mean 65.7 minutes, about 2.5 times baseline
• Week 1: 55.0 minutes; week 2: 76.4 minutes
• Daily goal met on 9 of 14 days
• No treatment day at zero

Speaker notes: Study time jumped as soon as treatment started and kept climbing in week two, which suggests the program, rather than gradual drift, raised my study time. Weekdays were strongest, averaging 75 minutes from Monday to Thursday, while weekends remained the weak point.

Slide 6: Limitations and Recommendations

• Self-monitoring may have raised behavior on its own
• A midterm in week 2 may have added motivation
• An A-B design cannot rule out outside events
• Next: weekend if-then plan, then thin the contract

Speaker notes: My design compared one baseline with one treatment phase, so something other than the treatment, such as the midterm, might account for some of the improvement. A return to baseline or a multiple-baseline design would give a firmer answer. Going forward, I will add a weekend plan and gradually require the goal on alternate days before earning the reward, as the textbook recommends for maintaining behavior.

Slide 7: References

• Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006, on implementation intentions
• Harkin and colleagues, 2016, on monitoring goal progress
• Miltenberger, 2015, the course textbook
• Steel, 2007, and van Eerde and Klingsieck, 2018, on procrastination

Speaker notes: Full APA references appear on the slide and below.

Response to Kayla

Kayla, your nail-biting project was creative, especially the habit-reversal step of clenching your fists when you noticed your hand rising, which gave you a competing response that is hard to perform at the same time. Your graph showed a clear drop after the phase line. I wondered whether the competing response would hold up during exams, when stress is highest, and whether you plan to track it through finals week. A second baseline taken during the exam period, even for a few days, would show whether the gains survive pressure.

Response to Noah

Noah, cutting your evening phone use from three hours to just over one was impressive. Like me, you found that putting the phone in another room mattered most, which fits the textbook's emphasis on stimulus control. Did you notice whether the time you saved went to sleep, study or something else? If it went to sleep, that might be worth measuring as a second outcome in a follow-up project, perhaps with a simple bedtime log kept beside the phone's screen-time report.

References

Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1

Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198-229. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025

Miltenberger, R. G. (2015). Behavior modification: Principles and procedures (6th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65-94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65

van Eerde, W., & Klingsieck, K. B. (2018). Overcoming procrastination? A meta-analysis of intervention studies. Educational Research Review, 25, 73-85. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.002