Summary: Reinforcement is the engine underneath every teaching procedure you will ever run. This page covers what reinforcement is (and the one-sentence definition the exam keeps coming back to), the difference between primary and conditioned reinforcers, how pairing turns you into a reinforcer before you ever place a demand, why a reinforcer that worked at 9am is worthless by 9:30, the Premack principle, the four intermittent schedules, and how to thin a schedule without losing the behavior.
Every other procedure in this section is a delivery system for reinforcement. Discrete trial training is a way of arranging opportunities to reinforce. Chaining is reinforcement applied to a sequence. Shaping is reinforcement applied to a moving target. So if reinforcement is fuzzy for you, everything built on top of it stays fuzzy, and the exam knows it. Domain C is 25% of the test, the heaviest of the six, and a large share of those questions come back to the ideas on this page.
What reinforcement actually is
Reinforcement is a consequence that makes the behavior it follows more likely in the future. That is the whole definition, and the important part is at the end: more likely in the future.
This matters because reinforcement is defined by its effect, not by anyone's intention and not by whether the thing looks pleasant. If you hand a learner a sticker every time they raise their hand and hand-raising does not increase, you did not reinforce hand-raising. You handed out a sticker. The word "reinforcer" is earned by the data, never assigned in advance.
That single idea answers a surprising number of exam questions. When a stem says "the RBT delivered praise but the behavior did not change," the answer is almost always that praise was not functioning as a reinforcer for that learner.
That's the free preview of Reinforcement and Schedules. The complete guide, plus all 851 practice questions and 3 full exams, is in the study pack and the book.