Skinner, B. F. (1986). Programmed instruction revisited

Prévia do material em texto

Programmed Instruction Revisited
Author(s): B. F. Skinner
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Oct., 1986), pp. 103-110
Published by: Phi Delta Kappa International
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20403280 .
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Programmed Instruct i o 
BY B. F. SKINNER 
THHE PUBLIC SCHOOL was 
invented to bring the ser 
vices of a private tutor to 
more than one student at a 
time. As the number of stu 
dents increased, however, each student 
necessarily received less attention. By 
the time the number had reached 25 or 
30, personal attention had become spo 
radic. Textbooks were invented to take 
over some of the work of the tutor, but 
two problems remained unsolved. What 
is done simultaneously by every mem 
ber of a large group cannot be evaluated 
immediately, and what is taught to a 
large group cannot be precisely what 
each student is ready just at that moment 
to learn. Teaching machines were in 
vented to restore these important fea 
tures of personal instruction. 
A BRIEF HISTORY 
More than 50 years ago Sidney Pres 
sey, a professor at Ohio State Universi 
ty, hailed "the coming 'industrial revolu 
tion' in education."' In 1926 Pressey 
had described a machine that 'tests and 
also teaches" (illustration, this page). A 
student studied a subject in the usual 
way and then turned to the machine. It 
directed the student to the first item on 
a multiple-choice test, and the student 
made a choice by pressing a numbered 
key. If the choice was right, the ma 
chine moved on to the next item; if the 
choice was wrong, the student pressed 
another key. When the student went 
through a test a second time, the ma 
chine stopped only on those items on 
B. F. SKINNER is a professor emeritus in 
the Department of Psychology, Harvard 
University, Cambridge, Mass. 
Teaching machines were invented to restore the importantfeatures 
of personalized instruction, recalls Mr. Skinner. Today, we have 
the technology that could enable students to profit from an 
immediate evaluation of what they have learned and to move 
forward at their own pace. 
Pressey's machine that "tests and also teaches." 
Photo by William 0. Seymour OCTOBER 1986 103 
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which the student's first choice had been 
wrong. 
I had not heard of Pressey's work 
when, at a meeting at the University of 
Pittsburgh in 1954, I demonstrated a 
machine designed to teach arithmetic 
(photo on this page). In that machine, a 
strip of paper passes from one side of 
the box to the other, exposing a square 
section on which a problem is printed. 
Small holes are punched in the paper, 
and the student causes numerals to show 
through these holes by moving sliders. 
The student then tests what he or she has 
done by turning a knob on the front of 
the box. If the student has solved the 
problem correctly, a new problem 
moves into place; if the answer is 
wrong, the student must reset the 
sliders. (The photo on page 106 shows 
a more sophisticated version of this ma 
chine, which IBM made for me a few 
years later. It has more sliders, and it 
has letters as well as numerals.) A re 
cent advertisement for a home computer 
showed a young girl solving a problem 
in arithmetic in much the same way, ex 
cept that she was pressing keys. 
My machine differed from Pressey's 
in several important ways. First, stu 
dents came to my machine without hav 
ing studied any special material before 
hand; they were being taught, not test 
ed. Second, and more important, the 
students composed their responses in 
stead of choosing them. That is the 
difference between, say, having a read 
ing knowledge and having a speaking 
knowledge of a second language. One 
can make an excellent score on a 
multiple-choice test of a second lan 
guage even when one cannot speak the 
language well. There is a similar (but 
less obvious) difference between "read 
ing mathematics" and "speaking mathe 
matics" - the difference most of us 
once felt when we followed easily 
enough as the author of a text solved 
a sample problem and then stumbled 
when we tried to solve similar problems 
by ourselves. The third, and perhaps the 
most important, difference was that 
Pressey's machine simply gave an im 
mediate evaluation of each response, 
whereas in my machine the items were 
arranged in a special sequence, so that, 
after completing the material in frame 
1, the students were better able to tackle 
frame 2, and their behavior became 
steadily more effective as they passed 
from frame to frame. I began to speak 
of "programmed instruction."2 
Machine to teach arithmetic demonstrated at the University of Pittsburgh, 1954. 
Composing answers by moving slid 
ers might have been good enough for 
simple arithmetic or spelling, but it was 
too slow and awkward for most of the 
things I wanted to teach. So I designed 
a different machine (see page 107), 
which had 30 frames of a program 
printed radially on a large disk. A single 
frame appeared in an opening in the ma 
chine. The student wrote a response on 
a strip of paper in another opening. By 
lifting a lever, the student then moved 
what had been written under a trans 
parent cover, where it could not be 
changed, and uncovered the correct re 
sponse. In 1958 a dozen of these ma 
chines were placed in a self-instruction 
room in Sever Hall in the Harvard Yard 
(see page 108) for use in my course, 
Natural Sciences 114. James Holland 
and I wrote the program, which was 
eventually published in workbook 
form.3 The first of about 2,300 items 
reads, "A doctor taps your knee (patel 
lar tendon) with a rubber hammer to test 
your ," and the student writes 
"reflexes." 
That sort of thing can also be done 
more conveniently with computers, of 
course. The machines I have described 
are museum pieces, and - appropriate 
ly enough - all of them are now housed 
in the Smithsonian. 
THE TEACHING MACHINE MOVEMENT 
I was soon saying that, with the help 
of teaching machines and programmed 
instruction, students could learn twice 
as much in the same time and with the 
same effort as in a standard classroom. 
Other kinds of machines soon appeared. 
In some of them the responses were 
chosen, as in Pressey's machine; in 
others the responses were composed, as 
in mine. Great numbers of programs 
were written. Most of them were pub 
lished in workbook form, with correct 
answers hidden beneath a sliding mask 
or found on another page. By the end 
of 1962, according to an editorial 
in Science, 250 programmed courses 
would be available in elementary, sec 
ondary, and college mathematics; 60, in 
science; 25, in electronics and engineer 
ing; 25, in foreign languages; and 120, 
in social studies. Many of these courses 
were excellent. A colleague once told 
me that he had decided that he ought to 
know more about biochemistry, so he 
had bought a programmed text. "It was 
amazing!"he said. "In a week I knew 
biochemistry!" He did not mean that he 
was then a biochemist, of course, but he 
had learned a great deal in a remarkably 
short period of time with very little ef 
fort. 
104 PHI DELTA KAPPAN Photo by Will Rapport 
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Machine to teach arithmetic and spelling built by IBM, 1958. 
members were to buy a dog and give it 
its daily ration in the following way: 
when the dog was moving about the 
room, they were to operate the flash and 
then give the dog a bit of meat. It would 
soon respond to the flash by coming to 
be fed - and when, after a day or two, 
it did so instantly, I would take over. 
When I saw the dog for the first time, 
I took the switch that operated the flash 
and told the photographer to keep his 
camera on the dog. I had put some 
horizontal lines on one wall of the 
room, and, when the dog went near 
them, I flashed the light. It came to the 
Look reporter to be fed and then went 
back near the lines - predictably, be 
cause I had just reinforced going there. 
Sighting across the dog's head, I chose 
a line somewhat above its normal posi 
tion and reinforced the first movement 
that brought the head to that height. 
When the dog returned from being fed, 
an effect was clear: the animal was 
holding its head noticeably higher, and 
I could then choose a higher line. As I 
moved upward from line to line, the 
dog's forefeet began to come off the 
floor, and it was soon standing straight 
up. Q.E.D. Since there was still some 
meat left, I continued this "differential 
reinforcement" until the dog was leap 
ing straight up, its hindfeet nearly a foot 
off the floor. A picture had been taken 
with each flash, and Look published one 
showing the final spectacular leap. 
You will not find a correct account of 
the kind of thing I did with the dog in 
most introductory psychology text 
books. Some of them would say that I 
rewarded the dog for jumping. As the 
etymology shows, however, a reward is 
compensation or remuneration for ser 
vices performed and is seldom immedi 
ately contingent on behavior. We re 
ward people; we reinforce behavior. 
Other texts would say that the dog 
learned by trial and error. But the dog 
was not trying to do anything when it 
lifted its head, and it certainly did not 
learn anything from errors. Some texts 
would call lifting the head or standing 
up purposive or goal-directed behavior, 
but a goal has no effect on the behavior 
through which i-t is reached. Only past 
consequences have any effect. 
TEACHING OR TRAINING? 
Many educators would say that what 
I did with the dog was training, not 
teaching. If so, it was very much im 
came a kind of bible in schools of edu 
cation. Students were no longer to be 
told things; they were to discover things 
for themselves. They were not to mem 
orize, but to think, grasp concepts, 
explore, be creative. Vast sums were 
spent on the development of materials 
to improve science teaching in high 
schools. Moreover, students would no 
longer add, subtract, multiply, and di 
vide (hand calculators could do those 
things); instead, with the help of the 
new math, they would think as mathe 
maticians thought. Twenty-five years 
later, however, students' grades in high 
school science and mathematics were, if 
anything, a little worse. Those who had 
developed the materials blamed the 
teachers, but it was the teachers who 
had needed help in the first place. 
TEACHING AND LEARNING 
The cognitive movement that fol 
lowed Sputnik I seemed to legitimize 
traditional theories of teaching and 
learning. Many educators were content 
with such books as William James' 
Talks to Teachers, which had been pub 
lished in 1899 and which was written in 
the language of the layperson. Pro 
grammed instruction, by contrast, took 
advantage of what had been discovered 
about teaching and learning in a special 
discipline called the experimental analy 
sis of behavior. My first programs were 
written when I was finishing an appli 
cation of that analysis to verbal be 
havior.4 By carefully constructing cer 
tain "contingencies of reinforcement," it 
is possible to change behavior quickly 
and to maintain it in strength for long 
periods of time. The details cannot be 
covered here, but I can illustrate the 
central process, called operant condi 
tioning, by means of a story. 
Many years ago I published an article 
titled "How to Teach Animals."5 The 
editors of Look found my article hard to 
believe, and they challenged me. If I 
could teach an animal as swiftly as I said 
I could, they wanted pictures. I accept 
ed the challenge. I would teach a dog to 
stand on its hind legs in a matter of 
minutes. I would neither touch the dog 
nor attract its attention in any way. I 
would not give it any reason to stand up 
(as by holding a piece of meat above its 
head). I would simply reinforce its be 
havior. 
Some preparation would be needed, 
however. A reinforcer is most powerful 
when it follows behavior very quickly 
- optimally, within a fraction of a sec 
ond. Giving a hungry dog a bit of meat 
is too slow. The dog has to see the meat 
and comeand get it, and these things 
take time. For essentially instantaneous 
reinforcement, a conditioned reinforcer 
is needed. In my article, I had explained 
how to condition the sound of a clicker 
as a reinforcer. But, since we were go 
ing to take pictures, I would use the 
camera flash instead. The Look staff 
106 PHI DELTA KAPPAN 
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proved training. Dogs have been trained 
for centuries, and there are useful rules 
of thumb, but it is highly unlikely that 
even the most expert animal trainer 
could have brought about that much 
change in behavior in such a short time 
by conventional means. Teaching is 
more than training, but it uses the same 
behavioral processes. 
Of course, we seldom teach in just 
that way. We do not teach a child to tie 
a knot by conditioning a reinforcer, giv 
ing the child two pieces of string, and 
then reinforcing any move that contrib 
utes to the fashioning of a knot. Instead, 
we show the child how to tie a knot; we 
model the behavior, and the child imi 
tates us. But why should the child do so? 
Before we can show the child how to 
tie a knot, he or she must have learned 
to imitate, and that learning will have 
taken place through operant condition 
ing. Because the vocal musculature of 
the human species has come under oper 
ant control, we can also tell the child 
how to tie a knot, and in that case the 
need for an acquired operant repertoire 
is even more obvious. 
Showing and telling are ways of 
"priming" behavior, of getting people to 
behave in a given way for the first time 
so that the behavior can be reinforced. 
We do not learn by imitating, however, 
or because we are told what to do. Con 
sequences must follow. Consider how 
most of us learned to drive a car. At 
first, we turned the starting switch when 
we saw our instructor do so, we pressed 
the brake pedal when he or she said 
'press," and so on. But the moves 
we made had consequences. When we 
turned the switch, the engine started; 
when we pressed the brake pedal, the 
car slowed or stopped. Those were nat 
ural consequences, and they were more 
closely contingent on our behavior than 
were those flashes on the behavior of 
the dog. They eventually shaped skillful 
driving. As long as we were responding 
to instruction, the car moved but we 
were not driving it. We learned "how to 
drive," in the sense of driving well, only 
when the contingencies of reinforce 
ment maintained by the car took over. 
We do not learn by doing, as Aristotle 
maintained; we learn when what we do 
has reinforcing consequences. To teach 
is to arrange such consequences. 
The same two stages occur in learning 
to talk about things. Someone primes 
our behavior either by saying something 
that we repeat or by writing something 
that we read. When reinforcing conse 
quences follow, we learn. For a time, 
our behavior may need to be "prompt 
ed." As it gains in strength, however, 
the prompts can be withdrawn or "van 
ished," in the sense in which a magician 
"vanishes" a bouquet of flowers. 
The roles of priming, prompting, 
and vanishing are especially clear in 
teaching or learning a poem. My daugh 
ter Deborah once came home from 
school complaining that she had been 
assigned to learn 15 lines of Longfel 
low's "Evangeline." ("Those are very 
long lines," she said.) I told her I would 
show her how she could learn them 
quite easily. I wrote the lines on a chalk 
board and asked her to read them. Then 
I erased a few words and asked her to 
read them again. She did so correctly in 
spite of the omissions. I erased a few 
more words, and she could still "read" 
them. After five or six erasures, she 
"read" them although there was nothing 
on the chalkboard. At first, the words 
were primes. By reading them, she en 
gaged in the required behavior - but 
not yet for the right reasons. The words 
I left on the chalkboard functioned as 
slowly vanishing prompts. We do some 
thing of the same sort when we learn a 
poem by ourselves. We prime our be 
havior by reading a line, and then we 
turn away from the text and say as much 
of the line as we can, looking back and 
prompting ourselves if necessary. By 
looking back less and less often, we 
slowly vanish the prompts. 
We refer to the same two stages when 
we say that education is preparation. 
"Preparation for life" was once the 
phrase. Teachers often forget, however, 
that preparing is not the same as living. 
The consequences that induce students 
to come to school, listen to their 
teachers, watch demonstrations, study, 
and answer questions are not the conse 
quences that will follow when they use 
what they have learned. Learning to 
drive a car is not driving, memorizing is 
not reciting, and learning to read is not 
reading. Students and teachers tend to 
move too quickly to the "living" stage. 
The student who wishes to be a violinist 
or a tennis player usually wants to play 
too soon. Likewise, students who de 
mand the right to choose what they will 
study are usually trying to skip the in 
structional stage. Those who criticize 
programmed instruction by saying that 
'. 
Tecin ahieuedi atrl cece 1, 98 
OCTOBER 1986 107 
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Self-instruction room in the Harvard Yard, 1958. 
students should learn to read real books 
also want to move out of the preparation 
stage too quickly. 
MOTIVATION 
For thousands of years students stud 
ied because they were beaten when they 
did not do so. The cane and the rod 
were the tools of the teaching profes 
sion. Unfortunately, they have not yet 
been fully replaced. Much of the time 
students still study to avoid the conse 
quences of not studying. The standard 
by-products of punitive control - tru 
ancy or dropping out, vandalism, and 
apathy - are all too evident. Obvious 
ly, it has been hard to find positive al 
ternatives. Passing grades, promo 
tion, scholarships contingent on grades, 
diplomas, prizes, and awards - if rein 
forcing at all - are not effectively con 
tingent on behavior. Nor has it been 
possible to make the reinforcers of daily 
life contingent on much of what is to be 
taught, for example, the "basics." 
The primary reinforcer in pro 
grammed instruction is of a special 
kind. Contingencies of survival in the 
natural selection of the species and con 
tingencies of reinforcement in the life 
time of an individual have made certain 
immediate consequences of behavior re 
inforcing, regardless of what then fol 
lows of biological or other signifi 
cance. For example, pushing is re 
inforced when something moves, quite 
apart from anything that happens after 
ward. The immediate effect has ac 
quired the power to reinforce because a 
great variety of other reinforcers have 
followed it. Good instructional pro 
grams maximize the effect of success as 
a conditioned reinforcer by asking stu 
dents to take very small steps and by 
making every effort to help them do so 
successfully. Success is perhaps not a 
very powerful reinforcer, but it has a 
powerful effect when properly sched 
uled and when successful responses for 
tunately occur on what is called a vari 
able-ratio schedule - the powerful 
schedule at the heart of all gambling 
systems. 
A similar solution is not available in 
the classroom because of the basic faults 
that programmed instruction was de 
signed to correct: only rarely can be 
havior be immediately reinforced, and a 
student cannot move on at once to new 
material. Hence teachers must resort to 
some kind of punishment. Such a return 
to aversive contingencies may be very 
subtle. A Committee for EconomicDe 
velopment complained that "an alarming 
number of students leave high school 
with the idea that the adult world toler 
ates tardiness, absences, and misbe 
havior."6 The committee called for 
"stringent education standards and 
tough discipline." "Discipline" has come 
a long way from its original association 
with "disciple"; it now means "punish 
ment," which, in turn, means more 
dropouts and more vandalism. The 
committee seemed to be aware of that 
and added that it wanted to "encourage 
maximum creativity on how these stan 
dards are achieved." In other words, the 
committee did not know how to achieve 
them. To return to punitive control is to 
admit that we have failed to solve a cen 
tral problem in education. 
Correct responses and signs of prog 
108 PHI DELTA KAPPAN Photo bv Will Rapport 
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ress are the kinds of reinforcers most 
appropriate to instruction as prepara 
tion, but other reinforcers must follow 
if there is any point in teaching. The 
reinforcers immediately affecting Debo 
rah's behavior as she learned those 15 
lines of poetry were probably negative. 
She was successfully fulfilling an as 
signment. (She may have gained a 
measure of positive social reinforce 
ment a month later when, as she report 
ed, she was the only one in her class 
who could still remember the 15 lines - 
but that was too late to help in the prepa 
ration stage.) If she ever recited the 
lines to herself for pleasure, the rein 
forcers were those that Longfellow put 
into his poem. Those are the kinds of 
reinforcers that are at work when, if you 
happen to like poetry, you memorize a 
poem and then recite it to yourself. 
While you are memorizing, however, 
the effective reinforcing consequence is 
getting the right words out. If you are 
composing a poem, your behavior may 
be reinforced in both ways: a line comes 
out right (and scans and rhymes, if it is 
that kind of poem), and the line says 
something you find pleasing or even 
beautiful. 
The same thing happens in writing 
prose. People are said to write articles 
or books for money or acclaim. Those 
may be rewards, but they do not occur 
soon enough to be reinforcers. At one's 
desk the reinforcers are the appearances 
of sentences that make sense, clear up 
puzzles, answer questions, make points. 
Instructional programs in which stu 
dents complete sentences, rather than 
select them from a set of multiple 
choices, have that same effect. Some 
one once said that programs that have 
blanks to be filled are like Swiss cheese, 
full of holes, but when students fill the 
holes with the right words, something 
happens that is very much like what 
happens when they use what they have 
learned. When we are writing a difficult 
paper and just the right word comes, a 
hole is filled and our behavior is rein 
forced. 
It is sometinies said that programmed 
instruction gives too much help, that it 
does not "challenge" the student. But no 
amount of help is too much in the prepa 
ration stage. It must vanish, of course, 
as other reinforcers take over. The more 
helpful the program, the more (and 
more easily) the student learns. Some 
350 years ago Comenius said, "The 
more the teacher teaches the less the stu 
dent learns," but that is true only if it 
means "the less the student learns about 
learning." Some students profit from 
bad teaching because they learn how to 
teach themselves, but good teachers cer 
tainly have their place. How to study is 
a separate skill, and it can be taught, 
possibly by a program designed to do 
so. 
THE PROBLEM OF ATTENTION 
The preparation stage of teaching 
raises a standard problem. Teachers 
cannot teach unless students pay atten 
tion. Students who "want an education" 
may pay attention for unidentified rea 
sons, but what can be done with the 
others? Physical restraint is one solu 
tion, albeit a crude one. A teacher in a 
small private school once boasted that, 
to keep her students from looking out 
the window, she simply held her classes 
in a room without windows. In essence, 
she put blinders on her students. In the 
heyday of the teaching machine move 
ment, a machine was advertised that 
held the student's head between ear 
phones, confronting a brightly lighted 
page. The machine forced students to 
hear and see. Unfortunately, it did not 
teach them how to listen or look. 
The threat of punishment falls short 
of physical restraint. Few words are 
spoken by teachers more often than, 
"Pay attention!" And these words are 
usually spoken with all the authority 
of "Achtung!" or "Now hear this!" 
Teachers who have relinquished the 
power to punish must resort to a pathet 
ic personal appeal: "Please pay atten 
tion." 
A third possibility is to attract atten 
tion. Television advertising has proba 
bly exhausted the possibilities. The cre 
ators of television advertising assume 
that people attend to anything that is 
loud, bright, colorful, endearing, amus 
ing, sudden, strange, or puzzling - or 
that they will do so at least once, if they 
are exposed to it many times. Textbooks 
are often constructed on similar princi 
ples, involving the use of colored pic 
tures and intriguing titles and subtitles. 
Unfortunately, such textbooks have a 
basic fault: they do not teach students 
to pay attention'to unattractive things. 
Computers have made it altogether too 
easy to attract the attention of students, 
and the need to teach students to pay at 
tention is often neglected, as Julie Var 
gas has pointed out.7 
Students pay attention when doing so 
has reinforcing consequences. Compare 
a typical classroom with a roomful of 
bingo players. No one tells bingo play 
ers to pay attention, nor are the cards or 
counters made particularly attractive. 
The players look and listen carefully for 
a very good reason: reinforcing conse 
quences follow only when they do so. 
Well-constructed programs have the 
same effect. Children who are said to 
have a short attention span will watch a 
western on television without taking 
their eyes off the screen. A book that is 
not attractive as an object will hold the 
reader if the writer has filled it with 
reinforcing things. 
APPRECIATION 
Not everything we want to teach can 
be programmed, but contrived reinforc 
ing contingencies are still useful in the 
preparation stage. How, for example, 
can we teach the appreciation of art, 
music, or literature? Perhaps another 
story will be helpful. 
In the early Fifties two of my students 
came to me with a problem. They 
owned several good pieces of modern 
art with which they had decorated their 
room, but they had now acquired a 
roommate who wanted to put a Harvard 
banner on the wall and a sports trophy 
or two on the mantelpiece. That would 
spoil the atmosphere. Did I see any rea 
son why they should not use some of the 
techniques I had described in my course 
to teach their roommate to enjoy mod 
ern art? I told them I saw no objection, 
provided they agreed to tell the room 
mate afterward what they had done. 
They began by paying little or no at 
tention to him unless he asked about 
their paintings or sculptures. They gave 
a party and bribed a young woman to 
ask the roommate about these art objects 
and to hang on his every word. They 
sent his name to Boston galleries, and 
he began to receive announcements of 
shows. A month later they reported 
some progress: the roommate had asked 
them to go with him to the Boston 
Museum of Fine Arts. They went, and 
when they saw him looking at a picture 
that he seemed especially to like, they 
dropped a $5 bill on the floor. He 
looked down and found the bill. Before 
another month had passed, they cameto 
show me the first modern painting pur 
chased by their roommate. 
Recently, I learned that one of the stu 
OCTOBER 1986 109 
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dents was living in New York City, and 
I phoned to ask him about the project. 
Had they ever told their roommate what 
they had done? No, he was sorry, they 
had not. What had happened to the 
roommate? He was not sure, but he had 
run across him recently in the Museum 
of Modern Art! Perhaps my students 
had no right to intervene in the life of 
their roommate in that fashion. I think 
they should at least have told him what 
they had done. But they had taught him 
to enjoy modem art, and he was appar 
ently still enjoying it 30 years later. Of 
course, they had used irrelevant rein 
forcers. Art is not something worth 
knowing about simply because you can 
talk about it to attractive people or find 
money on the floor of a museum. But 
that was part of the preparation stage. 
The paintings and sculptures took over 
soon enough. 
Suppose the roommate had been re 
quired to take a course in art apprecia 
tion - or had taken one as a "gut" 
course in order to remain eligible for a 
team. How would the instructor have 
induced him to look at paintings until 
the reinforcers that the artists put into 
them had their effect? Traditionally, the 
instructor would have asked him to an 
swer questions about artists, schools of 
art, periods, subjects, theories, and so 
on. Answering those questions would 
have had little more to do with the en 
joyment of art than the reinforcers my 
students used. And suppose the instruc 
tor had run across such an unwilling stu 
dent 30 years later in a museum of art. 
Would he not have been pleased that his 
teaching had been so successful? 
Consequences that are possibly irrele 
vant must also be used to induce stu 
dents to read books and to listen to 
music, until the very different conse 
quences that writers put into their books 
and that composers and performers put 
into their music can have their effect. 
These are the consequences that are 
eventually "appreciated." 
'Reading skills are very important. 
That's how you find out what's going 
to be on TV." 
DISCOVERY AND CREATIVITY 
Teachers also go too far in trying to 
make the preparation stage of learning 
resemble daily life when, rather than 
tell students the facts of science, they 
ask students to discover these facts for 
themselves. That is how scientists go 
about their work in the real world, and 
what is learned in this manner is no 
doubt a more genuine kind of knowl 
edge. But using apparatus and methods 
prescribed by a teacher is not really 
making a discovery. Indeed, this proc 
ess is not very different from "discover 
ing" the facts of science in a textbook. 
The discovery approach may help stu 
dents enjoy "a sense of what learning is 
all about," and they may find experi 
menting more interesting than reading, 
but it is impossible to learn very much 
science in this way. Only by designing 
their own apparatus and working out 
their own methods will students learn 
much about making discoveries, and 
that is very rarely done. Good research 
practice is a subject in its own right, to 
be taught as such. 
It is also a mistake to try to make the 
preparation stage "creative." A recent 
article in Science reported that only 
10% of all scientists had done creative 
work, a fact that the author explained by 
saying that only 10% of scientists "pos 
sessed creativity." It would be much 
more important to know how they were 
said to acquire creativity. People who 
discover or create are behaving in ways 
that - by definition - cannot have been 
taught. But preparing to discover or cre 
ate is feasible. The key word in Dar 
win's title was "origin." The origin of 
millions of species was to be found not 
in an act of creation, but in the selection 
of otherwise unrelated variations. Truly 
creative individuals, if any exist at all, 
behave in ways that are selected by rein 
forcement, but variations must occur to 
be selected. Some variations may be ac 
cidental, but students can learn to in 
crease the number and, in that sense, to 
be more creative. Like all the creative 
people of the past, however, they must 
first be taught something to be creative 
with. 
Education is primarily concerned 
with the transmission of the culture, and 
that means the transmission of what is 
already known. Educators have turned 
to discovery and creativity in an effort 
to interest their students, but good con 
tingencies of reinforcement do that in a 
much more profitable way. 
THE FUTURE 
The small computer is the ideal hard 
ware for programmed instruction. It 
is not functioning as a computer, of 
course; it is teaching. It should be called 
a teaching machine. We have flying 
machines, sewing machines, and cal 
culating machines - and a machine that 
teaches by arranging contingencies of 
reinforcement is a teaching machine. 
When computers were first used as 
teaching machines, their sponsors began 
to speak of "computer-aided instruc 
tion." That terminology is correct if 
teachers merely use computers to help 
them teach, but it is wrong when the 
computer does it all. We do not speak of 
computer-aided calculation. We use a 
calculating machine. 
With the help of teaching machines 
and instructional programs, schools can 
be designed so that students will profit 
from an immediate evaluation of what 
they have done and will move forward 
as soon as they are ready. Those who 
move quickly will cover many more 
fields, some of them possibly beyond 
the range of available teachers. Those 
who move slowly will survive as suc 
cessful students. Teachers will have 
more time to talk with their students, 
and students will learn to express them 
selves more effectively. (Students will 
have a great deal more to express, as 
well.) Teachers will have more time to 
get to know students and to serve as 
counselors. They will have more to 
show for their work, and teaching will 
become an honored and generously re 
warded profession. Because education 
will be much more efficient, it will 
probably cost less than it does now. 
This is not a utopian dream. It is well 
within range of an existing technology 
of teaching. 
1. Sidney L. Pressey, "A Third and Fourth Con 
tribution Toward the Coming 'Industrial Revolu 
tion' in Education," School and Society, vol. 36, 
1932, p. 934. 
2. B. F. Skinner, "The Science of Learning and 
the Art of Teaching," Harvard Educational Re 
view, vol. 24, 1954, pp. 86-97. 
3. James G. Holland and B. F. Skinner, The 
Analysis of Behavior (New York: McGraw-Hill, 
1961). 
4. B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: 
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957). 
5. B. F. Skinner, "How to Teach Animals," 
Scientific American, December 1951, pp. 26-29. 
6. New York Times, 6 September 1985. 
7. Julie S. Vargas, "Instructional Design Flaws in 
Computer-Assisted Instruction," Phi Delta Kap 
pan, June 1986, pp. 738-44. IB 
110 PHI DELTA KAPPAN 
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	Article Contents
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	p. 110
	Issue Table of Contents
	The Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Oct., 1986), pp. 97-184
	Front Matter
	The Editor's Page
	No Guarantees [p. 98-98]
	Washington Report
	The Babel of Bilingual Education [pp. 99-100]
	Stateline: Governors Push Better Schools Coalition [pp. 101-102]
	Programmed Instruction Revisited [pp. 103-110]
	Improving Productivity in Teaching [pp. 111-124]
	Special Section on Elementary Education, Featuring Secretary of Education William BennettFirst Lessons [pp. 125-129]
	Good Questions [pp. 130-131]
	A Mixed Bag [pp. 131-133]
	Rich Learning for All Our Children [pp. 133-134]
	The State of Instruction in Reading and Writing in U.S. Elementary Schools [pp. 135-138]
	New Lenses for Viewing Elementary Schools [pp. 139-142]
	Huge Learning Jumps Show Potency of Brain-Based Instruction [pp. 143-148]
	Keeping Track, Part 2: Curriculum Inequality and School Reform [pp. 148-154]
	Teaching the Bill of Rights [pp. 154-157]
	Ten Questions That Shook the Class [pp. 158-160]
	People in Educational Evaluation and Research
	An Interview with Robert Eaker: Linking Research and Classroom Practice [pp. 161-164]
	De Jure
	Is 'Tinker' Dead? [pp. 165-166]
	Prototypes
	Effective Inservice Training: Mission Impossible? [pp. 166-167]
	Books
	Review: The New Moral Education [pp. 167-170]
	Newsnotes [pp. 171-172, 174]
	Backtalk: Readers Debate Cramer on Athletics and Meyer on Teacher Education [pp. 174, 176, 179-182]
	Back Matter