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EDUCATION in the United States stands on the brink of a
fundamental change. A new scientific discovery called "programmed
instruction" is already well on its way toward revising age-old ideas of
how people can best be taught everything from spelling to psychology, from
music to higher mathematics. All across the U.S.--in great universities,
in huge industrial centers, in hastily improvised "laboratories," in
hillside shacks--men and women of a new breed called "programmers"
are working day and night to perfect a teaching technique that may
revolutionize the nation's schools. To check on the new discover, Look
has visited top men in the field of programmed instruction, examined their work
and tried out several of their educational devices.
As in the early stages of all great
revolutions, "the situation is fluid": methods differ; personalities
clash. Nevertheless, all those interviewed are aflame with a single sense
of excitement and optimism explodes into such statements as these:
--Programmed instruction will prove to be the most
significant innovation in education since the invention of the book.
--It will show us that the average human being now is using
only a tiny proportion of his true ability. When programmed instruction
is perfected, "average" students will finish a year's course in, say,
algebra within a half year or less. (Some already have done that.)
--Differences in ability, especially on the low side of the
scale, will tend to shrink. Many children now thought of as slow learners
are merely victims of inefficient teaching and poor motivation.
Programmed instruction will lead them gently and painlessly into the
mainstream of our educational process.
--Most classroom behavior problems will vanish.
--Teachers will be freed from the tedious, soul-sapping
chore of drumming in basic skills and memory work. They will get, in
exchange, the dignity -- and the challenge -- of a new role, similar to that of
teaching a college seminar.
--Programmed instruction will become a powerful instrument for
bringing literacy and technological skills to people of underdeveloped nations.
Here, American programming experience should give us a commanding lead
over Russia.
--It will find many other uses; in retraining adult workers
and technicians; in helping dropouts get back in school; in teaching
leisure-time skills to adults.
--Most important, programmed instruction gives us, for the
first time in history, a tool for applying the scientific method to the process
of education.
The men making these buoyant claims are
mostly psychologists by trade. But their ideas have the backing of
hardheaded, profit-minded businessmen. This year, more than 100 private
concerns are investing several million dollars in various forms of programmed
instruction. Conservative investment analysts predict that sales of their
products may exceed $100 million a year by 1970. Other experts feel that
this estimate is far too low.
Exactly what is programmed instruction?
Since it is linked with "teaching machines," many people feel
that it must be mysterious and complex. This is far from true. The
idea behind programmed instruction may be hard to grasp, not because it is so
complicated, but because it is so simple. The most striking thing about
the new techniques is how much it differs from the kind of teaching people have
been accustomed to for centuries. Here is how it generally works:
1. The student is given
information in tiny, easy-to-digest bits, only a sentence or a short paragraph
at a time.
2. The information is arranged in
logical order, with each step building on those that came before. The
first steps are very easy. They become more difficult so gradually that
the student is hardly aware of it. This arrangement is called a
"program."
3. At each step, the student
writes his answer; he participates actively in the learning process.
4. He is shown the correct answer
immediately, so that he can compare it with his own.
5. Most programs are written and
pretested to insure that almost all students will get about 95 per cent of the
answers right. This, according to the programmers, makes learning a
pleasure, not a threat, and leads students to learn faster and remember longer.
6. Each student works
individually, at his own rate of speed.
7. The program (on paper or
microfilm) may be loaded into a teaching machine. This is simply a box
about the size of a portable record player. The student turns a knob to
bring each step or "frame" before a window in the face of the box.
He writes in his answer to the frame, pulls a lever to uncover the
correct answer, then goes on to the next frame. A program may also be
presented in book form. This can be done by printing the frames on
beneath the other, with the correct answers a the side of the frames. The
answers are covered with a slider (or a ruler or sheet of paper), which the
student slides down after he has written each on of his own answers.
How does programmed instruction work in
an actual school system? To find out, Look visited Roanoke, VA., where the
nation's largest test of the new technique is now in its second full school
year. This term, more than 2,000 Roanoke junior-high and high-school
students are taking at least on programmed class in either mathematics or
language. They are using programs in book form put out by Encyclopedia
Britannica Films, Inc.
The Roanoke experiment started out with
a bang. In 1960, 34 eighth graders finished off a year's ninth-grade
algebra in a half year with no homework--then tested out at a ninth-grade
level.
Since then, a majority of students using
programmed material have outperformed their conventionally schooled mates, even
in rigorously controlled classes where the teacher was forbidden to give them
any help. Now, the "experimental" aura has faded.
teachers and students have accepted the new technique as a fact of school
life.
Classes are of normal size. In a
typical programmed math class, the students are working silently and steadily,
reading a frame, writing an answer, moving the slider to check their answer,
then going on to the next frame. An almost hypnotic silence pervades the
room. Every now and then, a student raises his hand, and the teacher goes
to help him or calls the student to his desk. "More than 90 per cent
of my time is spent in individual teaching," math teacher Major Wells of
Lucy Addison High School told Look.
Some students race ahead of others.
Roanoke teachers differ in their handling of this "problem."
Harold Barron of Monroe Junior High has devised a set of “challenges,"
or advanced problems, for those who might leave the class behind.
Other teachers give fast students the
reins and watch them fly. Last year, Mrs. Loetta Horton, Roanoke math
coordinator, taught a programmed class of 21 seniors with good math ability.
"During the year,"
{commercial break}
she said, "all of them finished axiomatic algebra.
all finished solid geometry. All had some calculus, and five
finished calculus. I gave one boy the solid-geometry course on a Friday
afternoon. The following Friday, I said, 'It's about time I quizzed you
on the first section of the course.' He said, 'Oh, I forgot to tell you.
I finished it on Tuesday.' He had become fascinated and worked all
weekend--did a semester's work in four days. I tested him on the
entire course, and he made 100." "Fast kids," added math
teacher Mrs. Martha Walden, "can just eat this stuff alive."
Slow learners? Programmed
instruction is nothing less than a godsend, say Roanoke teachers. Mrs.
Hester McCabe, an eight-grade math teacher at Lee Junior High, told Look,
"I had a very slow class. I wasn't getting anywhere with them, so I
asked permission to use a program. They started a month late with the
program, but they've caught up to the regular schedule. I know programmed
instruction is a salvation for these children. If a boy gets suspended,
or just doesn't work for a week, when he starts on the program again, he has
lost nothing. In a conventional class, he would have been completely lost
and would have become a nuisance. These children go slowly, but they
learn something. And then, too," Mrs. McCabe added wistfully,
"my stomach isn't hurting every day at the end of this class."
"I know I'm behind," said one
boy, who was lagging in a programmed algebra class of average ability,
"but I understand everything I've done. This thing"--he looked
at his programmed book--"leads you up to every step. It won't just
throw something at you, I never understood math before. Now, I've got it
cold."
A few Roanoke students complain that
they get bored while plugging away for long stretches on their programs.
(Programmers admit that their early efforts were unnecessarily boring;
now, they are add humor and novelty.) Teachers break the workweek with
occasional blackboard sessions and quizzes. For the most part, students
and teachers at Roanoke are asking for more programmed classes.
The Roanoke experiment, while the
largest, is only one of many programmed-instruction trials throughout the
nation. The early results of most of these trials would seem to justify
the programmers' bullish claims. But there are deeper questions for parents
and teachers to look in before entrusting their children to a new kind of education.
Where did it begin? How will it affect our schools? What are
the possible dangers?
The current programming movement might
be said to have begun on a parents' visiting day November 11, 1953, in a
Cambridge, Mass., school. There had been earlier, unsuccessful attempts
to develop self-testing devices, but Dr. B.F. (Frederic) Skinner was not aware
of them when he entered his daughter's fourth-grade class on that day.
Like millions of other parents, the distinguished Harvard psychologist
sat watching the teacher struggling to convey information to a roomful of
youthful minds.
The subject was arithmetic. As the
class dragged along at what seemed a snail's pace, Dr. Skinner became
increasingly appalled, then suddenly quite angry. "Seeing the
built-in inefficiency of the ordinary classroom situation," he told Look
recently, "I wondered how any learning at all could take place. And
I was angry at myself for not having applied my own work in psychology to the
field of education even sooner."
I occurred to Dr. Skinner that--in spite
of permissive discipline, colorful textbooks, green blackboards, movable desks
and even TV, movies and taper recorders--our methods for imparting knowledge to
students have remained fundamentally unchanged for over a century or more.
and he was convinced he had the key to a method that would move education
into the 20th century. With his usual crackling energy, Skinner hurried
home and started working out ways to apply the science of learning, as he saw
it, to the art of teaching.
The key to Dr. Skinner's new technique
came from a series of animal experiments, mostly with pigeons and rats, but
also with dogs, monkeys, apes and human beings. Through these
experiments, Skinner had developed a technique for controlling and measuring
the actions of animals almost as precisely as a physicist handles matter and
energy. His chief tool is not punishment, but reward. Punishment
can teach, Skinner found, but it causes emotional side effects (anxiety, neurosis)
that eventually block learning. So he uses reward, but in a special
way--precisely and in small, progressive steps.
As a demonstration of the technique that
led to programming, Dr. Skinner will take only two or three minutes to teach a
pigeon to turn around in a circle, not more than seven or eight minutes to
teach the bird to dance in a figure eight. His method is simple: The
pigeon is hungry and has learned it will get a grain of corn whenever a food
dispenser in the cage opens with a click. Skinner holds a switch that
will open the dispenser. He watches the pigeon's random motions. He does
not wait for it to turn all the around, an unlikely event; he rewards any
motion, even the slightest, that gets the pigeon nearer the
final action desired. When the pigeon turns its head only a fraction to
the right, Skinner quickly pushes the button, and the pigeon gets its food.
Next time, the bird must turn its head a little farther to the right or
shift its weight onto the right foot before being rewarded. One small
step at a time, the pigeon learns to turn in a circle, then reverse itself and
swing around the other way.
Skinner has worked up far more
spectacular demonstrations: a pigeon pecking out tunes on a toy piano; two
pigeons playing table tennis; two pigeons that will fight when a re light is
turned on, dance when a green light is on, and eat to a white light. In a
secret project during World War II, Skinner and his colleagues trained pigeons
t guide a missile toward a ship by pecking at its image on a screen that
controlled the missile's flight. The war ended before the pigeon-guided
missile was used. More recently, Enos, the space chimp, was taught his
orbital tasks by Skinnerian methods.
Dr. Skinner holds that learning--whether
animal or human--is not a mysterious process during which something called
"knowledge" is somehow transferred into something call "the
mind." For Skinner, learning is simply a "change in
behavior." A child who has learned "2 x 2 = 4"
"behaves" in a different way from one who has not. When the
teachers says "2 x 2," the child responds by saying (aloud or to
himself), "4." He is rewarded by being right. Skinner
rejects the notion that human learning must be rewarded by something external
like a piece of candy or an academic prize. Learning itself can be reward
enough. The more often a person is right and the quicker he knows it, the
faster and better he learns.
Therefore, what most horrified Skinner
about his daughter's class--and all conventional classroom situations--was the
lack of frequent, direct and precise reinforcement of the child's natural
tendency to learn.
Children are told to work hard for some distant reward—a good
grade, acceptance by a college, a successful career. But these events do not relate directly to
the learning at hand. In the ordinary
school situation, says Skinner, a child works mostly to escape a series of
minor penalties—the disapproval of teachers or parents or fellow students,
personal shame,
not getting a good
grade. He is rewarded when he gets
something right; but, generally, he cannot be
sure he is right until some time has passed. Hopefully, a quiz paper is graded
overnight. Even so, the child is working
on something else by the time he gets it back.
A good teacher
tries to make sure every child understands every step along the way – a practically
impossible task with two dozen or more children in tow. In a classroom, children usually get
information in fairly large, hard-to-digest chunks. This reduces their chances to participate
actively in the learning process and to know they are understanding what is
being taught.
On any given day,
the bright child may not be listening; he is bored. The “slow” child may not be listening; he is
hopelessly discouraged. The sick child
cannot listen; he is home in bed. A few
such days in a subject as complex as algebra, and even the brightest child may
be lost. Then, says Skinner, the glimpse
of an algebraic symbol is likely to cause mostly guilt, anxiety or fear. And another child may be on the road to
truancy, delinquency, dropout and a final place among the hordes of out-of-school,
out-of-work youths.
How much better,
reasoned Skinner, if every child could proceed at his own rate, in small steps,
responding at every step, being hardly ever wrong and knowing immediately that
he is right! If pigeons could be taught
to guide a missile, what miracles of human learning—even with so-called “slow
learners”—must lie ahead! Within a few
months of visiting his daughter’s class, Dr. Skinner had built his first teaching
machine. By 1958, he had perfected the
type of machine described earlier, had written (with Dr. James G. Holland) a
program for the machine and was using it to teach part of a Harvard psychology
course.
Since then,
teaching-machine companies have been sprouting by the dozens. From their efforts have come a bewildering
array of gadgets, from cardboard boxes to electronic consoles hooked up with
giant computers. Putting together the
hardware for programmed instruction was comparatively easy. But when educators were called in to write
material to go into the gadgets, a surprising thing happened: Even the best teachers discovered they had
much to learn about the learning process.
Here, the new
movement made its first and what may be its greatest contribution to education:
It forced teachers to take the beginner’s point of view. It allowed them to measure the effectiveness
of their teaching at every step along the way.
And it showed them that present teaching methods—even in conventional
classrooms—should be, and can be, vastly improved.
Programmed instruction
has a built-in safeguard against muddy, incomplete, illogical teaching. After the material to be taught is broken
down into small steps, it is tried out on students of the age and grade that
will be using it. If more than a few
students get any step wrong, that step, or those that precede it, are assumed
to be inadequate and must be rewritten.
Again and again, the program is tested and refined. Not only must it become nearly error-proof,
it must also get somewhere. There is no
great problem in writing a few steps that every student can get right—if the
steps are so easy that they teach very little.
Even here, the program tends to correct the programmer. If the program is merely marking time, the
student will soon be bored into
making mistakes.
Low IQ children do all right
Another surprise: Once a program has
been fairly well perfected, it can be used for children whose age and IQ vary
rather widely. In most trials so far,
children with low IQs get just about as many right answers as do children rated
high in intelligence, but they tend to go slower. In your children, even the difference in
speed is less than might be expected.
This finding bolsters those psychologists who have long held that few
children are really dull. “The trouble
is,” says Dr. Skinner, “that misguided parents and teachers too often kill the
child’s natural inclination to learn.”
In New York City, Basic Systems, In., a programming company, has been
using unemployed high-school dropouts to test new programs. Says the company’s president, David Padwa, “These
kids perform on the program just as well as students in school.”
Programmers
quickly develop a unique attitude toward students. Dr. Stanley Sapon, a programming consultant
in Palo Alto, Calif., says “It used to be that, when we wrote a textbook, we
were saying to the student, ‘Here is a repository of all my wisdom. If you don’t get it, you’re stupid.’ Now,
when we write a program, we’re saying ‘Here’s what I want to teach you. If you
don’t get it, I’m stupid.’”
Under the glaring
light of programming, many an educator has had the painful experience of seeing
flaws in his teaching technique, gaping holes that he had been bridging over by
clever verbiage. For some, the
experience is too painful to take. A
favorite sport among programmers is telling tales of would-be programmers who
have retreated back to the comparative safety of the textbook and the lecture
platform.
Some advocates of
the new discipline go so far as to say that it will not only help teachers
improve their presentations, but also “expose” those who have been “spouting
verbal nonsense.” Dr. M. W. Sullivan,
head of Sullivan Associates in Los Altos, Calif., and one of the nation’s top
programmers, told Look: “There are thousands of men in classrooms and on
lecture platforms all over the world who don’t know what teaches and what doesn’t
teach. And, really, there’s been no way
to find out. Now, for the first time, we
have a way of testing the teaching and learning process.”
For those who have the toughness and flexibility to stick
with programming, the experience is exhilarating.
“A good program
is beautiful,” says Dr. Sullivan. “It
has the functional perfection of a house that’s built for you. It eliminates the static of most classroom
situations. Someday, we’ll have a
program that represents pure, noise-free communication. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer
all the time. Every time we test a
program, we get new information about how people learn. You’ll find that the best programs bear
little resemblance to any conventional teaching sequence. They represent a totally new way of
organizing a field of knowledge. When I’ve
finished a program, and it has been tested and revised again and again, it can
out-teach me any time. My programs
murder me. And we’re just beginning to
appreciate the power of our techniques.
Our best programs now are only faint indications of what is to come.”
“This powerful
new technique has placed an entirely new and heavy responsibility on the
publisher,” says Theodore Waller, president of Grolier’s teaching Materials
Corporation, a large producer of programmed materials. “We are not dealing with just another
education product; we are producing materials that are already having a
revolutionary impact on teaching methods.”
So far in its
precocious infancy, programming has most excelled at teaching the “factual”
subjects – spelling, grammar, math, the sciences, technical skills. It can teach foreign languages with ease and
precision. Here, the written program may
be backed up by a tape machine; at certain steps, the student presses a foot
pedal to hear the spoken tongue. In
language classes, the program and the classroom teacher make good
partners. The program does the dirty work
(vocabulary, grammar, drill) and allows the students to move at their own
rates. When a few students have reached
a certain place in the program, the teacher may bring them together to practice
conversation and discuss the finer points of the language.
They won’t be fenced in
Programming
generally has steered clear of subjects calling for individual interpretation –
history, philosophy, literature and the like.
Even her, it may find a role.
Says P. Kenneth Komoski, head of the Center for Programmed Instruction
in New York City, “We can program parts of
history courses. For example, I’m now
writing a program that describes a hypothetical river-valley civilization. The student will take the program, then
compare my model civilization to some real ones—those that existed in the Nile,
Tigris-Euphrates and so on – and end up criticizing the model. We can also do a program on how to study history
or how to do a research paper. This will
encourage outside reading and individual research.”
Whatever the
terrain, some programmers refuse to be fenced in. “Anything you can test,” says Dr. Sullivan, “I
can program.”
At Harvard, Dr.
Skinner and his associates have devised machines that use the programming
approach to teach some quite basic human skills –shape discrimination,
inductive reasoning, a sense of rhythm, a sense of musical pitch.
The music machine
is a Rube Goldberg arrangement; the program is punched on a piano roll that is
wired into a reed organ. The organ pipes
up with a note or a combination of notes.
When it stops, the child tries to pick out the notes on the
keyboard. A visitor watches an
eight-year-old girl recognizing and playing three-note chords by ear.
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