Special Ed · Behavior
Token Economy Board
Tap to earn tokens toward a chosen reinforcer. Research-backed Premack contingency for any age or diagnosis.
How many tokens?
Pick a target that fits your student’s current tolerance for delay.
Name the reinforcer the student is working for.
How this helps (research)
Token economies are among the oldest and most-studied evidence-based behavior interventions. The mechanism rests on Premack’s principle (Premack, 1959): a high-probability behavior can reinforce a low-probability one when the two are contingent.
Tokens bridge the delay between a desired behavior and the actual reinforcer. The student earns a concrete, visible symbol of progress that accumulates toward a chosen reward. Cooper, Heron & Heward (2020, Applied Behavior Analysis, 3rd ed.) list token economies as a Tier 2 PBIS intervention with strong evidence across ages and diagnoses, particularly for students with ASD, ADHD, SLD, and intellectual disability.
Clinical best practice: start with a short schedule (3–5 tokens) and fade the ratio as tolerance grows. The reinforcer must be chosen by the student—preference assessments (DeLeon & Iwata, 1996) are the gold standard. This board is a digital replacement for the laminated 5-square token strips most self-contained classrooms use every day.