Excerpt from Beyond the Backyard: Train Your Dog to Listen Anytime, Anywhere!
To help dogs learn to generalize their behaviors, we have to know when to increase the challenge level. This is something dog trainers call “raising criteria”.
Before we can raise criteria, though, your dog needs to meet criteria. Basically, this means that your dog needs to successfully complete the behavior to your specifications. For example, if your goal is a 30 second sit stay under mild distraction and your dog performs a sit stay for 30 seconds with a piece of bread sitting on the counter, then your dog has met criteria. But what if your dog goes to the counter and sniffs for the scent of the bread instead of performing the stay? Then we should say that your dog has not met criteria.
When your dog meets criteria you’ll reward him with a motivator, but when he fails to succeed, you’ll withhold the motivator. (You’ll also make sure that he is unable to get the bread on the counter, since helping himself to the distraction would have been very reinforcing – but not reinforcing what you wanted!)
When your dog consistently meets criteria by ignoring the bread on the counter and performing correctly, you can raise criteria. This simply means you’ll ask your dog to do more in order to earn a cookie. But… what is “more”? And how many successes do we want to see before we raise criteria again?
When it’s time to raise criteria, the trick is to select a new challenge that your dog is likely to meet. If you work to raise criteria in a systematic and measured fashion, you will find that your dog makes progress extremely quickly while maintaining a positive attitude throughout his training sessions. It’s good to ask more of your dog, because it keeps him thinking and working for you, but if you ask for too much all at once, you’ll demoralize him with excessive failure. At the same time, if you raise criteria too slowly, your dog will become bored and his progress will slow down. In other words, raising criteria is something of a Goldilocks question: how much is just right?
For more information on effective training methods, read Beyond the Backyard: Train Your Dog to Listen Anytime, Anywhere!, a special book by Denise Fenzi!
