Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

Table I A set of frames designed to teach a third or fourth grade pupil to spell the word manufacture. 1. MANUFACTURE means to make or build. ChatT factories manufacture chairs. Copy the word here. 2. Part of the word is like part of the word factory. Both parts come from an old word meaning make or buUd. MANU __ ^ URE 3. Part of the word is like part of the word manxud. Both parts come from an old word meaning hand. Many things used to be made by hand. FACTURE 4. The same letter goes in both spaces. M __ NUF CTURE 5. The same letter goes in both spaces. MAN FACT RE 6. Chair factories chairs. the student is actively f>articipating in the learning experience. This is not rote memorization. The student leams one frame at a time and cannot proceed until the previous one is mastered. Another example demonstrates instruction in high school science. See Table II. It can be seen in Table II that the frames become progressively more difficult as new concepts are introduced, but the new concepts cannot be mastered until the former ones are learned. In this method of careful programming the students build their understandings step by step. Learning Theory To justify this type of teaching method one must subscribe to a few definite principles of psychology, a summary of which appears below. 1. Learning consists in making various responses in the presence of given stimuli. To learn a response, the pupil must make it when the stimuli are present. He must be active to learn, i.e. he must actually respond in a behavioral fashion. Here is where teaching machines differ from other media of instruction and communication which are only stimulus devices; for example, models, motion pictures, opaque projections, phonograph sounds, tape recordings, etc. Douglas Porter explains that such devices— "present a student with information about how to make a given response, or about when it is appropriate to make the response. They do not provide a setting for the practice of responses under specifiable and controlled circumstances. Thus it may be said that stimulus devices provide learning content without any assurance that a learning process will be carried out.* •Porter, "A Critical Review . . . Teachings Devices" Harvard Educational Review vol. 27, no. 2 (1957) p. 129. In contrast, other devices give practice in pt-r forming resp)onses but provide no stimulus in formation about the circumstances under whicl behavior is appropriate. Examples of such response-producing devices are the typewriter ant the abacus. But the teaching machine Ls i stimulus-response device which induces leani ing because it incorporates the complete learning process under controlled conditions. Tht machine might be more properly called a "learning machine," for it makes the student behavethe learner, not the teacher, becomes the focus ol activity. Because pupils in the common classroonare not often involved actively in a lesson, wt find, to our distress, much teaching but relatively! little learning taking place. 1 2. For learning to be effective the stimuli presented must appear in minute steps, following a sequence appropriate to the desired fhia behavioral. In experiments with lower organism} it has been shown that behavior can be taughl most efficiently when it is broken down into successive behavioral units. One reinforces each specific movement that leads toward the desired behavior, be it a movement of the rat's eye, head, or leg. Skinner applies this principle to verbal behavior as well. For him "understanding" a subject simply means that a student can respond correctly to a large number of questions about it. The student is able to do this only after he has learned the subject through a detailed and logical progression of stimuli which elicit the correct responses. On this basis, the series of stimub ( called the "program" ) must be constructed with meticulous care. 3. Learning is achieved most efficiently when responses are immediately reinforced. In the case of the teaching machine, reinforcement is provided by the information of the student that his response is "right." (Some machines have given candy to the students, but this proved to have diminishing returns as effective reinforcement.) By merely informing the student that his answer is "correct" you strengthen the behavior preceding the reinforcement. That is, it becomes more likely that in the future the pupil, when confronted with the same stimuli, will respond in the desired manner. This constant feedback is what makes the pupil learn. He behaviorally responds to clearly organized, specific items, and he is told immediately whether his behavior is right or wrong. The immediacy of reinforcement cements the learning bond. In the normal classroom situation, the teacher cannot provide immediate reinforcement to each of 30 pupils, but with the teaching machine, such feedback becomes real. Furthermore, it is provided at a rate determined by the capacities of the individual pupil. In this respect the teaching machine is similar to a private tutor.i Fro and Con A teaching machine has no advantages whatsoever to someone who refuses to accept the learning theory on which the device is based. As 26 Educational Screen and Audiovisual Guide — January, 1961