ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with the null hypothesis that there is no difference between the results of treatment with operant conditioning and play therapy. The sample consists of twenty of the twenty-five schizophrenic boys housed in a newly established ward of The Woodlands School. The children were treated in especially rebuilt rooms, providing what was hoped were optimum conditions for learning. Each was treated forty-five minutes, five days a week by a nurse's aide and a nurse as the co-worker. The nurse's aide was alone with the child in the treatment room while the co-worker assisted her from behind a two-way mirror of an observation room between the two treatment rooms. Differences in therapist were controlled by having the same two nurses treat a pair of children, one child by each method. The treatment rooms were identical. The positive reinforcement was a small candy delivered by a dispensing machine strapped to the child and activated by the co-worker.
