I enjoy history and psychology, and while researching for this assignment, I came across a name that I was familiar with, B.F. Skinner. I knew that B.F. Skinner significantly impacted psychology with his operant conditioning and behaviourism theories. Still, I didn’t understand why his name kept coming up in Audrey Watter’s Hack Education and how he may be relevant in education and technology.
Watters (2018) noted that after visiting his daughter’s classroom in 1953, Skinner had an ingenious idea to build a teaching machine. The idea was formed after observing that all students were learning at the same rate and that students did not receive fast feedback on exams and assignments. This contradicts one of the main principles of operant conditioning, which assumes that positive reward is used to modify behaviours. He designed his teaching machine with pre-programmed quiz questions that students could answer at their own pace and promptly receive feedback on whether they responded correctly or wrongly. Today, we have all utilized a variation of Skinner’s teaching machine without realizing it, including taking a quiz online and receiving immediate feedback and grades.
“I would argue, in total seriousness, that one of the places that Skinnerism thrives today is in computing technologies, particularly in “social” technologies.”
(Watters, 2018, p. 5)
Skinner’s work on behaviourism is still prominent in today’s instructional design. According to Ertmer and Newbie (2013), behaviourism is still utilized to build audio-visual materials and teach pedagogies that use preprogrammed texts (p. 49). Furthermore, behaviourism is used in computer-assisted education and mastery learning, including observable and quantifiable outcomes, learner analysis, instructional presentation sequencing, tangible rewards and informative feedback, simple and complex sequencing, and the use of prompts (Ertmer & Newby, 2013, p. 49). Skinner’s work on behaviourism began nearly 69 years ago, and it is remarkable how much of an impact he has had on today’s education and technology.
The Teaching Machine
B.F. Skinner explains his teaching machine and methodology in the video below. If you have the time, I recommend watching the video.
(B.F Skinner. Teaching Machine and Programmed Learning,” 2011)
References
B.F Skinner. Teaching machine and programmed learning. (2011). [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTH3ob1IRFo
Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (2013). Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism: Comparing Critical Features From an Instructional Design Perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 26(2), 43–71. https://doi.org/10.1002/piq.21143
Watters, A. (2018, October 18). B. F. Skinner: The Most Important Theorist of the 21st Century. Hack Education. http://hackeducation.com/2018/10/18/skinner
Jess, I loved reading your post. Thank you. I had heard of Skinner as he relates to psychology, but never realized or made the connection of his work to education. Thank you for drawing that line for me to make the connection. I also never knew about his teaching machine invention. What aspects of behaviourism stand out for you most relevant as it relates to digital education?
Thank you for including that video at the end of the post. I have never heard of Skinner before, but wow. What a fascinating person. I would love to know how his teaching machine actually worked from a technical perspective. Was it an actual working device or just an idea, concept or prototype. Whether the teaching machine actually worked, his reasoning behind it and his arguments for the efficiency in learning it created were interesting.
This teaching machine medium would be an interesting technology to figure out how Kozma and Clark would react to it. Kozma would probably look to the how the mediums attributes (real time feedback, each learner moving at their own pace) affect how the medium delivers its message. Clark might argue that the same information could be delivered by a teacher or a tutor.