Since we got Dan, I have been wanting to try this little project but hadn’t been able to find the bells. We picked some up from a toy store last weekend and on Monday I decided to set it up. The idea is that when he needs to go outside, he’ll ring the bells and we can take him out to potty. But, before he can learn that, he has to know how to ring the bell!
I decided to shape this behavior with a clicker and some treats to help him practice the shaping game in the process. Shaping is the training technique of asking your dog to get a little bit closer to the final behavior in order to earn a click/treat. This might be after each step or sometimes you might need to stay on the same step for a few trials. A trial is each behavior and the click/treat that go with it during shaping. For mastered behaviors, a trial is each time you ask your dog to do the behavior. Breaking behavior into trials helps us to measure the behavior and graph it.
So, before we get to the video, here is the data – get excited!
Before you can take data for a shaping project, you have to outline each shaping step. I challenge you to read these shaping steps before watching the video to see if you can identify them during the training session.
Here is the data for the training session. Cumulative # of trials means that I added the number of trials during the current shaping step to the total number of trials so far. This allows us to see the progression towards the last shaping step.
After the learning part of the shaping lesson, I did a few trials to check how well Dan knew the behavior. He did pretty well, but if he had not done as well this would be a hint for us to go back a step or two and do some more training.
Once the dog knows the behavior, you can start checking for generalization. This is the idea that he can do the behavior in many other situations or scenarios. If he did it right the first time, we moved on to something else. If he didn’t, I tried a few more times and then if he still didn’t perform the behavior, I made it a little easier for him (ex. leaning towards the door). Then we tried the first check again. There are many more scenarios we could have done, but we started with these ones.
And now, here’s the video of the whole session, from the first doorbell touch to the last generalization check. The final step would be to check for maintenance. Maintenance checks ask the question “Will he still do it later?” I don’t have the video for that part, but he’s done great, ringing the bell every time I ask.
Happy Training!
Laura