Programmed instruction

Here's a post from a highly respected old hand at the behavioral and
academic games:

>"The main reason programmed
>learning ala Skinner failed is that, as was often the case, he had
>preconceived ideas about how things should be done.  In this case,
>he was convinced that errorless learning was the ideal and so when
>a program was tested and errors occurred, smaller intermediate steps
>were added so as to preclude errors by future students.  The result
>was, indeed, deadly dull programs for most students.
>
>Much as I admire Skinner for many of this creative ideas, he was
>probably the most opinionated person I ever knew.  Actually, errors
>are beneficial to learning when appropriate correction is allowed.
>Sometimes we learn more from our mistakes than otherwise.  What was
>needed was "branching programs," ones that moved along rapidly but
>branched off to teach something when an error occurred.
>
>Another way of saying all of this is that Skinner did not have a
>good THEORY of learning to bring to bear on the method; he had his
>dogmatic truths.  It's a pity, because the methodology has so much
>to offer."

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    William S. Verplanck          [email protected]
  An award-winning site: http://web.utk.edu/~wverplan/
    http://web.utk.edu/~wverplan/kantor/kantor.html
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