In 1954 Burrhus Frederick Skinner, the famous behaviorist who developed the operant conditioning paradigm, began to design a “teaching machine” that could promote learning more effectively than traditional educational methods, which the author considered ineffective and criticized. with remarkable success.
Thus Skinner created a programmed teaching method based on operant conditioning that would have a great impact on the educational context of the second half of the 20th century. In this article we will explain what exactly Skinnerian programmed teaching consisted of.
Skinner believed that Traditional teaching was based excessively on punishment ; In operant terms, he stated that students’ behavior in the classroom was controlled primarily by aversive stimuli. This means that children learned to act in ways that avoided bad grades, criticism from adults, or ridicule from peers.
However, the research of Skinner and his followers clearly demonstrated that reinforcement is more effective than punishment for learning new behaviors In this sense, he not only identified an excessive use of punishment but also a low frequency of reinforcements; He attributed this fact to the excessive number of students per teacher.
Furthermore, according to this author, on the rare occasions when reinforcers were administered to students, this usually happened with a long time delay with respect to the execution of the relevant responses. Another of the basic principles of operant conditioning is that reinforcement is most effective when it appears immediately after the behavior.
The last of the key defects of traditional teaching that Skinner pointed out was the absence of systematization in educational programs The father of operant conditioning believed that teaching should be based on the method of successive approximations, by which responses that are increasingly closer to the objective are reinforced.
Principles of Programmed Teaching
Skinner’s method is probably the most famous in the field of programmed teaching; However, it is not the only one that exists.
It is characterized by its linearity, since it follows a fixed sequence of contents (which differentiates it from Crowder’s branched programming), as well as its four basic principles.
1. Establishment of clear objectives
Unlike many of the predominant educational methods of the time, Skinner’s programmed teaching gave great importance to establishing the objectives of the educational program to be designed. In this way it was possible to optimize the tasks and the presentation of the contents based on different aspects, mainly difficulty.
2. Division of educational content
In Skinner’s method, successive divisions of the educational material are made: firstly The programs are separated into modules, and these into tables or frames with specific content. As we will see in the next section, teaching was carried out through a linear succession of texts (or other types of materials) and evaluation exercises.
3. Increasing learning difficulty
Another of the central aspects of Skinnerian programmed teaching is that the learning material is presented gradually depending on the relative difficulty of each of the segments. Since we place ourselves in the context of the operant paradigm, we can speak specifically of the shaping or method of successive approximations
The fourth basic principle of Skinner’s educational model is the importance given to the active participation of students in their own instructional process. This clashes head-on with the receptive and rote learning techniques typical of traditional teaching, which do not promote motivation on the part of the student at all.
Skinnerian teaching machines
Skinner called the teaching machine he designed “GLIDER.” It was a mechanical device that allowed automatic control of the learning process, given that it was strictly planned following a linear progression. In this way he developed programs for teaching spelling, mathematics and other academic subjects.
Teaching using these machines consisted of a reinforcement program typical of behavioral guidance. We say that this had a linear character because texts and exercises were presented following a fixed sequence, determined mainly by the difficulty of the segments of material that students had to learn.
Individually, students read a short segment of material (a frame or chart). Next they have to answer a question; The answer is in missing word format, which consists of filling in a blank space. The teaching machine immediately informs the student whether he has missed or succeeded which constitutes a reinforcement.
When the student responds correctly to the evaluation exercise of a specific content, he or she moves on to the next frame and possibly receives another type of reinforcement. If she fails, she can re-review the learning material until she gets it right and continues with the training program.
