Approximations
Writing a training plan requires a clear goal to achieve and regular assessments of these goals. Below you'll find some tips and help on creating approximations, choosing your reinforcers and how to assess your progress during training a behaviour.
Approximations
What are approximations? Approximations are the steps you take to get from where you and your animal currently are, to the final behaviour and goal of your training plan. Each step from one to the next should be fairly simple to allow your animal to continually achieve and have positive associations with your training sessions.
Following on from our training plans segment let’s use an excitable dog as our example; Your dog at home is very excitable and you want to train them to not jump on newcomers.
- Your first approximation may be to turn away and ignore your excitable dog when you first enter until all 4 paws are on the ground before rewarding them with a treat and some cuddles.
- Next, you may start coming in with a treat and rewarding your dog for not even attempting to jump.
- After that, you might try coming in and immediately asking your dog to ‘sit’ before giving them a treat and saying hello.
- Once your dog starts sitting upon seeing you return every time, you can start asking family/household members and friends to also ask your dog to ‘sit’ and have a treat ready to go when they come in.
Each of these steps is what we call an approximation.
Reinforcers
Rewards, treats, reinforcers, let’s talk yummies!
Rewards, often called the reinforcers in training, are something we give an animal to confirm that yes, they have done the right thing.
Often, we use food-based rewards as they are a primary reinforcer. Primary reinforcers are things animals innately want, which is why food works so well.
Variable reinforcers are just reinforcers we change to keep things interesting. Variety is the spice of life. The more curious an animal is the more willing they are to train to find out the answer. For example, for our dog we may use: pieces of their kibble, small pieces of cheese, small pieces of cooked chicken, a lick of dog-safe peanut butter, their favourite treat broken into smaller bits.
It’s important to not use too much that we overfeed our animal via training treats, we still want them to be a healthy weight! Sometimes it may be a case of adjusting how much of something they currently get regularly or removing it from the normal diet completely and reserving it just for training.
You could use multiple reinforcers in one session or use a different one every session, either way, the more you up your animals curiosity the more excited they will be for training sessions and the better time you’ll both have!
Assessing how your plan is going
So, you’ve been doing a training plan for a month, how is it going? It’s important to have regular check-ins with yourself and your team to see how things are going.
The reason we set such strict criteria when we write our training plan is so that we can easily see if we are achieving or not.
Sometimes we may have made our approximations too large/complicated and need to adjust them. The more black and white we can make a situation the easier our animal can understand it. We could also have gone the opposite way and find that our animal is breezing through every step easily and we can make are approximations slightly more difficult. In this case it’s important to remember we don’t want to make it too hard and stop our animal succeeding at all, we always need positive steps forward.
If you’re not achieving in making progress towards your goal behaviour it may be good to get a friend or co worker to watch a training session, either in person or a filmed one. Watching ourselves back or having someone else watch can often point out flaws we didn’t even notice. It also builds our evaluation of training skills and makes us all better in the process. You can always email training@nationalzoo.com.au with a video of a session and what you’re stuck on or for a time to meet up and chat in person about any goals and specific issues you’ve encountered.