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
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Programmed

Instruct

BY B. F. SKINNER

THHE

PUBLIC SCHOOLwas
invented to bring the ser
vices of a private tutor to
more than one student at a
time. As the number of stu

io

Teachingmachines were invented to restore the importantfeatures

of personalized instruction, recallsMr. Skinner. Today,we have
the technology that could enable students toprofit from an
immediateevaluation of what theyhave learned and tomove
forward at their own pace.

dents increased,however, each student

necessarily received less attention. By
the time the number had reached 25 or

30, personal attentionhad become spo

radic.Textbooks were invented to take
over some of the work of the tutor, but

two problems remainedunsolved.What

is done simultaneouslyby 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

turesof 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
In 1926 Pressey
tion' in education."'
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.

Pressey's machine

that "tests and also

Photo by William 0. Seymour

teaches."

OCTOBER

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1986

103

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
in 1954, I demonstrated
Pittsburgh
a
machine
to teach arithmetic
designed
(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
if the answer
is
moves
into place;
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 inmuch 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
and having a speaking
ing knowledge
knowledge of a second language. One
an excellent
score on a
can make
test of a second lan
multiple-choice
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,
in my machine
whereas
the items were
arranged in a special sequence, so that,
after completing
in frame
the material
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

104

Machine

to teach arithmetic

demonstrated

Composing
answers by moving
slid
ers might have been good enough for
simple arithmetic or spelling, but itwas
too slow and awkward for most of the
things Iwanted 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
in workbook
eventually
published
items
form.3 The first of about 2,300
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
I have described
course. The machines
are museum pieces, and - appropriate
ly enough - all of them are now housed
in the Smithsonian.

at the University

of Pittsburgh,

1954.

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
as in Pressey's machine;
in
chosen,
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,
to an editorial
according

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.
PhotobyWillRapport

PHI DELTA KAPPAN

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chineswould have cost money thatwas

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Machine

to teach arithmetic

and spelling built by IBM, 1958.

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
of materials
spent on the development
teaching in high
to improve science
students would no
schools. Moreover,
and di
longer add, subtract, multiply,
vide (hand calculators could do those
things); instead, with the help of the
new math, they would think as mathe
years
thought. Twenty-five
maticians
later, however, students' grades in high
school science and mathematics were, if
anything, a little worse. Those who had
blamed
the
the materials
developed
teachers, but it was the teachers who
had needed help in the first place.
TEACHING AND LEARNING

havior.

that fol
The cognitive movement
lowed Sputnik I seemed to legitimize
theories of teaching and
traditional
learning. Many educators were content
James'
with
such books as William
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

106

PHI

DELTA

to verbal be
cation of that analysis
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. Iwould teach a dog to
stand on its hind legs in a matter of
I would neither touch the dog
minutes.
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
Some preparation would be needed,
however. A reinforcer ismost 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 come and get it, and these things
take time. For essentially instantaneous

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. Itwould
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
to keep his
and told the photographer
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
text
most
introductory
psychology
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
re
ately contingent on behavior. We
ward people; we reinforce behavior.
texts would
Other
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
have any effect.
consequences

reinforcement,a conditioned reinforcer

is needed. Inmy article, I had explained
how to condition the sound of a clicker
as a reinforcer. But, since we were go
I would use the
ing to take pictures,
camera flash instead. The Look staff

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

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
is
Teaching
means.
by conventional
more than training, but it uses the same

behavioral processes.

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

sequencesmust 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

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
of
when the contingencies of reinforce
the vocal musculature
ing. Because
ment maintained by the car took over.
the human species has come under oper
ant control, we can also tell the child We do not learn by doing, as Aristotle
how to tie a knot, and in that case the maintained; we learn when what we do
To teach
has reinforcing consequences.
need for an acquired operant repertoire
is to arrange such consequences.
is even more obvious.
The same two stages occur in learning
and telling are ways of
Showing
to talk about things. Someone primes
"priming" behavior, of getting people to

'.

Tecin

ahieuedi

atrl

cece

1,

98

our behavior either by saying something

that we repeat or by writing something
reinforcing conse
that we read. When
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.
prompting,
The roles of priming,
and vanishing are especially
clear in
teaching or learning a poem. My daugh
once came home from
ter Deborah
that she had been
school complaining
assigned to learn 15 lines of Longfel
low's "Evangeline."
("Those are very
long lines," she said.) I told her Iwould
show her how she could learn them
quite easily. Iwrote 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
I erased a few
spite of the omissions.
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
By
if necessary.
prompting ourselves
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.
for life" was once the
"Preparation
phrase. Teachers often forget, however,
that preparing is not the same as living.
that induce students
The consequences
listen to their
to come
to school,
study,
teachers, watch demonstrations,
and answer questions are not the conse
quences that will follow when they use
to
what they have learned. Learning
is
drive a car is not driving, memorizing
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
students who de
too soon. Likewise,
mand the right to choose what they will
study are usually trying to skip the in
structional stage. Those who criticize
instruction by saying that
programmed

1986
OCTOBER

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107

Self-instruction

students should learn to read real books

also want tomove 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
and
ancy or dropping out, vandalism,
apathy - are all too evident. Obvious
ly, it has been hard to find positive al
promo
ternatives.
Passing
grades,
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 tomake the reinforcers of daily
life contingent on much of what is to be
taught, for example, the "basics."
in pro
The
primary
reinforcer
grammed
instruction
is of a special

108

room in the Harvard

Yard, 1958.

of survival in the
kind. Contingencies
natural selection of the species and con
in the life
tingencies of reinforcement
time of an individual have made certain

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
immediateconsequencesof behavior re material. Hence teachers must resort to
inforcing, regardless of what then fol
some kind of punishment. Such a return
lows of biological
or other signifi
to aversive contingencies may be very
cance. For example,
pushing
is re
for Economic De
subtle. A Committee
inforcedwhen somethingmoves, quite velopment complained that "an alarming
apart from anything that happens after
number of students leave high school
ward. The immediate effect has ac
with the idea that the adult world toler
quired the power to reinforce because a ates tardiness, absences,
and misbe
great variety of other reinforcers have
called
havior."6 The committee
for
instructional pro
followed
it. Good
and
"stringent
education
standards
the effect of success as
grams maximize
tough discipline." "Discipline" has come
a conditioned reinforcer by asking stu
a long way from its original association
dents to take very small steps and by with "disciple"; it now means "punish
making every effort to help them do so ment," which,
in turn, means more
Success
is perhaps not a dropouts
successfully.
and more
vandalism.
The
very powerful reinforcer, but it has a committee seemed to be aware of that
powerful effect when properly sched
and added that it wanted to "encourage
uled and when successful responses for
maximum creativity on how these stan
tunately occur on what is called a vari
dards are achieved." In other words, the
the powerful
able-ratio
schedule
committee did not know how to achieve
schedule at the heart of all gambling
them. To return to punitive control is to
systems.
admit that we have failed to solve a cen
A similar solution is not available in tral problem in education.
the classroom because of the basic faults
Correct responses and signs of prog

PHI DELTA KAPPAN

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ress are the kinds of reinforcersmost

appropriate to instruction as prepara
tion, but other reinforcersmust follow

dent learns," but that is true only if it

means "the less the student learns about

if there is any point

bad teaching because

in teaching.

The

learning." Some students profit from

they learn how to

reinforcersimmediatelyaffectingDebo

teach themselves,but good teacherscer

rah's behavior

tainly have their place. How to study is

a separate skill, and it can be taught,
possibly by a program designed to do
so.

as she learned those 15

lines of poetrywere probably negative.

She was successfully fulfilling an as
signment.

(She may

have

gained

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

While you are memorizing, however,

the effective reinforcingconsequence 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

teach unless

cannot

students pay atten

but what

sons,

can be done with

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

thewindow, she simplyheld her classes

In essence,
in a room without windows.
she put blinders on her students. In the

heyday of the teachingmachine move

ment,

a machine

was

advertised

that

350

years

ago Comenius

said,

"The

follow

only when

they do so.

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

storywill be helpful.
In the early Fifties
came to me with

forced students to
page. The machine
hear and see. Unfortunately,
it did not
teach them how to listen or look.

owned several good pieces of modern

The threatof punishment falls short

of physical
spoken by

restraint. Few words are

teachers more often than,

"Pay attention!"And these words are

usually

spoken with

all

the authority

ators of television
that people attend

more the teacherteaches the less the stu

quences

held the student's head between ear

phones, confronting a brightly lighted

holes with the rightwords, something

more easily) the student learns. Some

counters made particularly attractive.

The players look and listencarefully for
a very good reason: reinforcingconse

the

power to punish must resort to a pathet

ic personal appeal: "Please pay atten

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
the program,
the more
(and
helpful

a typical classroom with a roomful of

bingo players. No one tells bingo play
ers to pay attention, nor are the cards or

The preparation stage of teaching western on television without taking

raises a standard problem. Teachers their eyes off the screen. A book that is

rather than
dents complete sentences,
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

forced.

so

same effect. Children who are said to

have a short attention span will watch a

THE PROBLEM OF ATTENTION

puzzles, answerquestions,make points. of "Achtung!"or "Now hear this!"

Instructionalprograms in which stu Teachers who have relinquished the

like what
happens that is very much
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

doing

Well-constructed programs have the

lines to herself for pleasure, the rein tion. Students who "want an education"
forcerswere those thatLongfellow put may pay attention for unidentified rea
into his poem. Those are the kinds of
reinforcers that are at work when, if you
a
happen to like poetry, you memorize
poem and then recite it to yourself.

Students pay attention when

has reinforcingconsequences.Compare

tion."
A

is to attract atten

third possibility

tion. Television advertising has proba

bly exhausted thepossibilities. The cre
advertising assume
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 itmany times. Textbooks
are often constructed on similar princi
ples, involving the use of colored pic

tures and intriguingtitles and subtitles.

such textbooks have a
Unfortunately,
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

two of my students
a problem.
They

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 inmy 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 came to
show me the first modern painting pur
chased by their roommate.

Recently, I learnedthatone of the stu

OCTOBER 1986

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109

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
to the
had not. What had happened
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?
that are possibly irrele
Consequences
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."

THE FUTURE
DISCOVERY AND CREATIVITY
The small computer is the ideal hard
Teachers also go too far in trying to
make the preparation stage of learning
ware
for programmed
instruction.
It
resemble daily life when,
is not functioning as a computer, of
rather than
tell students the facts of science, they
course; it is teaching. It should be called
ask students to discover these facts for
a teaching machine. We have flying
sewing machines,
and cal
themselves. That is how scientists go machines,
about their work in the real world, and
culating machines - and amachine that
what is learned in this manner
of
is no
teaches by arranging contingencies
reinforcement
is a teaching machine.
doubt a more genuine kind of knowl
When
computers were
first used as
edge. But using apparatus and methods
prescribed by a teacher is not really
teaching machines,
their sponsors began
making a discovery.
to speak of "computer-aided
instruc
Indeed, this proc
ess is not very different from "discover
tion." That terminology
is correct if
teachers merely use computers to help
ing" the facts of science in a textbook.
The discovery approach may help stu
them teach, but it is wrong when the
dents enjoy "a sense of what learning is computer does it all. We do not speak of
all about," and they may find experi
computer-aided
calculation. We use a
menting more interesting than reading,
calculating machine.
but it is impossible to learn very much
With
the help of teaching machines
science in this way. Only by designing
and instructional programs, schools can
their own apparatus and working
out
be designed so that students will profit
from an immediate evaluation of what
their own methods will students learn
much about making
discoveries,
and
they have done and will move forward
that is very rarely done. Good research
as soon as they are ready. Those who
practice is a subject in its own right, to move quickly will cover many more
be taught as such.
fields, some of them possibly beyond
It is also a mistake to try to make the
the range of available teachers. Those
who move slowly will survive as suc
preparation stage "creative." A recent
cessful
students. Teachers will have
article in Science
reported that only
more time to talk with their students,
10% of all scientists had done creative
and students will learn to express them
work, a fact that the author explained by
selves more effectively.
saying that only 10% of scientists "pos
(Students will
It would be much
have a great deal more to express, as
sessed creativity."
more important to know how they were
well.) Teachers will have more time to
said to acquire creativity. People who
get to know students and to serve as
to
discover or create are behaving in ways
counselors.
They will have more
show for their work, and teaching will
that - by definition - cannot have been
become an honored and generously
re
taught. But preparing to discover or cre
ate is feasible. The key word in Dar
warded profession.
Because education
win's title was "origin." The origin of
will be much more efficient,
it will
millions of species was to be found not
probably cost less than it does now.
in an act of creation, but in the selection
This is not a utopian dream. It is well
of otherwise unrelated variations. Truly
within range of an existing technology
creative individuals, if any exist at all,
of teaching.
behave inways that are selected by rein
forcement, but variations must occur to
1. Sidney L. Pressey,
"A Third and Fourth Con
be selected. Some variations may be ac
tribution Toward
the Coming
'Industrial Revolu
cidental, but students can learn to in
vol. 36,
tion' in Education,"
School and Society,
crease the number and, in that sense, to
1932, p. 934.
2. B. F. Skinner,
and
"The Science of Learning
be more creative. Like all the creative
the Art of Teaching,"
Re
Harvard
Educational
people of the past, however,
they must
view, vol. 24, 1954, pp. 86-97.
first be taught something to be creative

with.

'Reading skills are very important.

That's how you find out what's going
to be on TV."

110

is primarily
concerned
Education
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.

3. James G. Holland
and B. F. Skinner,
The
(New York: McGraw-Hill,
Analysis
of Behavior
1961).
4. B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior
(New York:
1957).
Appleton-Century-Crofts,
5. B. F. Skinner,
"How to Teach Animals,"
December
1951, pp. 26-29.
Scientific American,
6. New

York Times, 6 September

1985.
Julie S. Vargas,
"Instructional Design Flaws in
Instruction," Phi Delta Kap
Computer-Assisted
IB
pan, June 1986, pp. 738-44.
7.

PHIDELTA
KAPPAN

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