The Effects of Sex, Socioeconomic Class, Experimenter Race, and Kind of Verbal Reinforcement on the Performance of Black Children

A report of a study conducted to answer three questions: (1) What are the differential effects of praise and correctness reinforcers on the performance of black children from lower and middle socioeconomic classes? (2) Are sex differences a significant factor affecting performance of black children from lower or middle socioeconomic classes or with either kind of reinforcer? and (3) What is the effect of the race of the experimenter on the performance of black children? The Ss were 24 middle class black children and 24 lower class black children who were second graders in the Savannah-Catham County Public Schools in Savannah, Georgia. There was an equal number of each sex in each socioeconomic class and each group was matched on chronological age and intelligence grade level based on their performance on the Kuhlman-Anderson Intelligence Test. The procedure required each S to alternately drop cylindrical and square shaped blocks into correspondingly shaped holes for five min while receiving verbal reinforcement which connoted praise (e.g., "You are a good boy," "You are a fine girl"), or which connoted correctness, (e.g., "That is the right way," "That is the correct way"), on a fixed intermittent schedule for five min. The dependent variable was the number of responses the child made during the five min reinforcement period. The results lend support to the contentions that middle class black children are more responsive to verbal reinforcement than lower class black children and that children from both lower and middle socioeconomic backgrounds do not respond differentially to the semantic nuances connoted by praise and correctness reinforcers. The results also suggest that black children respond better to a black experimenter on performance tasks than to a white experimenter, although it is difficult to generalize as to the effect of experimenter race because the differences obtained may be a function of the personal characteristics of the experimenters rather than racial characteristics since only one experimenter from each race was used. AA