MODERN LEARNING THEORY AND SOME NEW

APPROACHES TO TEACHING

B. F. SKINNER
Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

We are in the midst of a wave of educational reform, center

ing on the secondary school but reaching into higher education as
well. There have been other waves of reform, but this one is unique
in at least one respect: it is essentially a consumers' revolt. The dis
affected are those who employ or otherwise depend upon the prod
ucts of our educational system. In the past, it was the educator him
self who fancied he saw some better way of teaching. Comenius
wrote a new kind of textbook, and Rousseau, the father of progres
sive education, had quite explicit theories about human conduct.
Current proposals are what one might expect from a consumer
rather than a producer or practitioner: it is argued that we need
bigger and better schools, financial inducements to attract better
teachers, changed emphases on subject matter, and so on. The
methods of education are seldom examined. Yet, no enterprise can
really hope to improve itself without a close look at its own tech
nology.
A new and effective scientific analysis of behavior has much
to offer here. I cannot go into the details, but I shall try to demon
strate by my enthusiasm the kind of confidence which it inspires in
a In the past ten or fifteen years, we have learned a
practitioner.
great deal about learning, about ways of bringing about changes in
the behavior of an organism, human or sub-human, and this new
knowledge is directly extensible to practical problems. There is no
reason why it cannot be applied to education.
A first step is simply to interpret what is now going on. Edu
cation has had a long history of coercive techniques. I like to refer
to this as "aversive" control because it involves those things which
men turn away from. Punishment exemplifies one use of aversive
events, but there is another application in building rather than sup

64
pressing behavior. We induce the behavior we want by generating
it as a form of escape, or at best, avoidance. The average American
college student attends classes, reads texts, and prepares papers not
because he wants to, but because he dare not do anything
else. When we excuse students from work as a reward, instead of
offering them additional work, we recognize the aversive character
of our practices. Tests function not so much to find out where the
student stands, so that further progress can be planned, as to main
tain threat. If everyone scores well, the test is made more difficult.
Three unfortunate standard by-products of aversive control
In the first place, the student
are obvious in the field of education.
may simply escape from control. Education has its own word for
this — "truancy" — which comes from an old word meaning
"miserable." Other forms of escape are not quite so conspicuous
and cannot, indeed, be corrected by a police officer ; simple inatten
tion at a lecture or in reading a textbook and forgetting the ex
amples. Another by-product is aggressive counteraction against the
institution. Most cities have special squads of police to watch
schools over the weekend to prevent vandalism. This would scarcely
be the case if there were not explicit aggression toward school
property. A more vicious vandalism comes later, when students
become taxpayers and refuse to support measures for extending
and improving education. A third by-product is perhaps the worst
of all : a stubborn apathy. All this borders on neurotic behavior. A
recent study at the University of Michigan showed that 8 per cent
of undergraduates report to the mental hygiene clinic every year
and that 35 per cent of these are judged psychoneurotic. Much of
of control used in education.
this can be attributed to the techniques
Secondary schools probably create much of the delinquency which
they find so troublesome.
The alternative to aversive control is what the layman calls
reward. more explicit analysis, we call it positive reinforce
In a

ment. The school does not have much of this at its disposal. Grades,
prizes, medals, diplomas, and other marks of progress through the
system ( much of this is mainly a reassurance that the student is not
going to fail) have a certain spuriousness about them. As I have
put it elsewhere, in an American school, if you correctly ask for the

65
salt in French, you get an "A" ; in France, you get the salt. The dif
ference between "A" and salt is the difference betwen the engi
neered reinforcements of the school system and the real reinforce
ments of everyday life. You may be able to justify setting up
French with spurious reinforcements if the student eventually comes
under the influence of the natural consequences of speaking French
in everyday life.
Some "real life" consequences have been brought into the
classroom, but this has generally been done with a curious indirec
tion. An early example was reported by Erasmus. An English
gentleman decided to teach his son Latin and Greek without punish
ing him. He gave the boy a bow and arrow and rewarded him with
cherries for hitting Greek and Latin letters set up as targets. He
also cut Latin and Greek letters out of biscuits and fed them to the
boy. A psychologist might conclude that as a result, the boy sali
vated slightly upon seeing a Greek or Latin text, and that possibly
he was a better archer. But any considerable progress in learning
Greek or Latin is doubtful.
Current efforts to bring pleasant and interesting things into
schools miss the point in the same way. The important thing is not
whether interesting things happen in a school but whether they hap
pen at the right time in relation to the behavior of the student.
The specific temporal and spatial relations between what the
student does and what happens to him as a result are called, in
more technical terms, "the contingencies of reinforcement." The
old notion of utility, in hedonistic philosophies, supposed that a
man evaluated the net consequences of an action and then acted
accordingly, but we now know that it is not the net advantage but
what happens at the moment which is important. The gambler
shows this. He is reinforced on a schedule which will convert a
pigeon or a rat into a pathological gambler, too. His net gain, the
net utility of the system, is negative. One promising result of the
research I have referred to is a demonstration that large rewards
are not needed to generate a high level of activity. But the few re-
inforcers we have must be used skilfully.
The majority of students suffer, first of all, from the fact that
their behavior is only distantly related to observable results. Some

66
students may learn in spite of our ineptitude because they have
learned to bridge the gap between their behavior and distant con
sequences. But most students need better conditions at just this
point. A student finds it is difficult to study a text when nothing de
pends on his behavior except his grade on an hour-test a month
away. He is not receiving the reinforcements essential for strength
ening and modifying his current behavior.
The teaching machines, which my colleague, Dr. Holland,
will describe in more detail later, were designed to arrange con
ditions for effective study. They have the following general
characteristics. There is an immediate report to the student: he does
something, and something then happens. This temporal connection
between behavior and its effects generates a high level of enthu
siasm and brings about appropriate changes in behavior. You have
only to see this in a simple laboratory demonstration to know what
power this one simple change in procedure can make.
Secondly, the machines permit each student to go at his own
rate. Everyone who has taught a class knows the enormous ineffi
ciency which results from the peculiarly modern attempt to teach
more than one student at once. Some students are necessarily held
back who ought to use their time to better advantage and others are
forced to go faster than they should. A student who does not quite
master the first day's assignment because of the speed at which the
class is moving is even less able to master the second, and still less
the third. This cumulative effect of ignorance means, of course,
that many students fall hopelessly behind. The student who is
lucky enough to have just the capacity needed to adjust to the speed
at which the teacher is moving is rare.
The machines are designed to make use of the fact that when
a student has mastered a given stage, he is then, and only then, al
lowed to go on to the next. Thorndike and Gates, in one edition of
their book on educational psychology, raised the question of whether
or not a textbook could be designed in which the student was not
permitted to read Page 2 until he had thoroughly understood
Page 1. The teaching machine is essentially a book of that kind.
The machines are also designed to take the student through a

very carefully constructed program, leading from ignorance to

67
competence. The student begins with the knowledge he brings to
the machine; he moves along at a rate appropriate to his achieve
ment at every stage ; and he eventually reaches any degree of com
petence desired. Nothing is missed when the student is ill or away
from the class for any other reason.
In these programs the steps can be so small that they are
almost always correctly taken. We have worked out a great many
devices for maximizing the student's success. Making a program
for a teaching machine reveals the essentially sadistic nature of test
construction : we resist writing an item which the student will under
stand. Instead, we try to show him what he does not know so that
he will study more industriously in the future. Material which is
easy to understand seems to "give the point away." But is it not the
function of the teacher to "give information away" rather than to
withhold help and punish for errors?
A machine with properly programmed material should elim
inate the need for tests. The student who works through a good set

of materials should know it. The student who gets through a course
should get an "A." The fast student, of course, will pick up several
"A's" while the slow is picking up one, and this is as it should be.
A grade which estimates the smattering of a subject a student has
achieved no longer has any meaning.
Let me describe two samples of current results. I shall begin
with a secondary school because the result is quite dramatic. A
month ago I visited the eighth grade of a school in Roanoke, Vir
ginia. There were thirty-four students with I. Q.'s ranging from 89
to 123. Professor Allen Calvin at Hollins College had taken over
the teaching of ninth-grade algebra to this eighth-grade class by
machine, under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. He used a

relatively simple machine, and material which had been pro

grammed rather hastily to keep up with the rapidly moving students
and was yet untested. When I entered the building, classes were
changing, and I saw a single file of students moving down the main
corridor, each carrying a machine. (A self-instruction room was
not available.) Each student put his machine on his desk in his
home room and went to boxes thumbtacked along the walls for the
particular set of materials he was to study next. He put the material

68
in his machine and set to work. Within two or three minutes the
room was quiet. Every student was working with the deepest con
centration. The group I was with walked up and down the aisles,
talking in a normal tone of voice, and students seldom looked up
from their work. This was not algebra spiced to be interesting: it
was not "Algebra for Young Americans," or anything of that kind,
but straight solving of equations. And it was evidently fascinating.
Without teacher, textbook, or homework this eighth-grade class has
shown a better than standard performance on a national norm test
for ninth grade, and if material were available they could cover
the entire high-school mathematics curriculum of the state of Vir
ginia in less than two years.
It was a sobering spectacle. Here was a relatively simple
machine, with not yet perfected material, working beyond our wild
est expectations. Yet it was pretty obvious why it was working this
way. Every student in the class was active throughout the period.
One student was not reciting while the rest twiddled their thumbs
or kicked their feet against their desks. They were not solving a

few problems to be handed in and seen again, graded, the next day.
Each student was immediately getting something out of what he
was doing and moving forward with sustained interest. And this
was true of the lower I. Q.'s as well as the higher.
At what I naturally like to regard as the other extreme on the
continuum of education, I have been teaching my own course at
Harvard for three years with the help of teaching machines. My
colleague, Dr. James G. Holland, and I have programmed 60 sets
of material in a course in human behavior. This year the enroll
ment has been unusually large and because of space restrictions
we have had to distribute the machine material throughout the
term. Last year, when we had enough machines, the students
worked on them for the first month or two of the course, during
which I did very little lecturing. In this way they covered the basic
material, the major principles, terms, ideas, and facts of the course.
I then began to lecture to them — knowing for the first time in my
history as a teacher that almost everyone in my audience under
stood the terms I was using and knew the references I was making

69
to facts and principles. The result was the most successful college
teaching I have ever enjoyed.
I cannot prove the advantage of the machines with matched
groups. I am, in fact, not interested in "controls." There is just
no doubt that students work well this way. In general they like
this way of studying. It is much less convenient to go to a self-
instruction room than to study at home from a textbook, but it
is a bargain and they know it. They can cover from a fifth to
a quarter of my course in perhaps 15 or 20 hours, and they cover
it much more thoroughly than was once the case.
Harvard is interested in expanding this program, and other
colleges have programs under way in a variety of fields. At
Hollins College, work is going forward in language instruction,
using machines with an audio attachment. At Oberlin College,
there is a program, for example, in musical theory. At Earlham
College, there are programs in modern languages and freshman
English. At Hamilton College a course in logic and another course
in psychology are being taught in part by machine. The part of a
course in psychology which Dr. Holland and I have prepared has
been sent to scores of colleges, and we get frequent reports of its
use with improvised machines.
We have not been going long enough to be sure of this, but
retention appears to be excellent. A few minor tests have been
made, and with promising results. There may be a very simple
reason — studying by machine is a pleasant experience which
the student does not want to forget.
There are two bottlenecks. One is machines — American
industry has not risen in any very commendable style to the occasion
— and the other is programs. But more and more people now
are undertaking to make programs. One unforeseen advantage
is that the programmer gets a very effective feedback from the
student. You can tell by examining a few sets of responses
whether a particular item is working properly. This would be
comparable to discovering that only 50 per cent of students, say,
correctly understand a given sentence on a given page of a text
book. Programs will be made by those who know how to program
and by those who do not. They will be tested in the market place,

70
and revised and improved. I have faith in the market place.
The immediate success of machine teaching could conceiv
ably be unfortunate, for it might mean that a cheap way of solving
immediate practical problems will obscure a possible evaluation
of the whole educational process. Let me give you one example.
In an analysis of behavior, especially of verbal behavior, we deal
with the process of paying attention in a new way. My colleague,
Dr. Holland, is responsible for pioneer work of this kind in con
nection with getting people to watch radar screens. How can you
induce someone to look closely at something for a given length of
time? It is tempting to try to do this by making what he is looking
at attractive. But he must look and continue to look for a good
reason ; that is, something must happen after he has looked, rather
than before.
Yet, all the visual devices ever brought into education, like
Erasmus' story of the cookies cut in the shape of the Greek
alphabet, work at the wrong time. They attract attention, rather
than reward it. Textbooks printed in four colors are designed to
capture attention; they do not teach the student that paying atten
tion may be worthwhile. Yet we want the student to look at an
uninteresting black and white page and read it with interest and
will do this
if,

energy. He in his experience, rewarding things

have happened after he has done so. Of course, you may first
capture attention, and then, when the student looks, reinforce him
for attending. But this not good procedure. Every time you
is

attract the attention of the student (with dramatic television film,

a

for example) you deprive him of one opportunity to learn how

reinforcing may be to pay attention.
it

There are other "special abilities" which can be taught in the

same way. (We are now content simply to measure them.) There
also the possibility of an entirely new analysis of knowledge. My
is

book, Verbal Behavior, was written before had become interested

I

in teaching machines, yet certain parts of are almost handbook

it

in the art of programming. The notions of knowledge and com

munication are reduced to very practical terms. When you say
something to student, in what sense have you communicated
a

anything? How do you bring about this thing called communica

71
and revised and improved. I have faith in the market place.
The immediate success of machine teaching could conceiv
ably be unfortunate, for it might mean that a cheap way of solving
immediate practical problems will obscure a possible evaluation
of the whole educational process. Let me give you one example.
In an analysis of behavior, especially of verbal behavior, we deal
with the process of paying attention in a new way. My colleague,
Dr. Holland, is responsible for pioneer work of this kind in con
nection with getting people to watch radar screens. How can you
induce someone to look closely at something for a given length of
time? It is tempting to try to do this by making what he is looking
at attractive. But he must look and continue to look for a good
reason ; that is, something must happen after he has looked, rather
than before.
Yet, all the visual devices ever brought into education, like
Erasmus' story of the cookies cut in the shape of the Greek
alphabet, work at the wrong time. They attract attention, rather
than reward it. Textbooks printed in four colors are designed to
capture attention; they do not teach the student that paying atten
tion may be worthwhile. Yet we want the student to look at an
uninteresting black and white page and read it with interest and
will do this
if,

energy. He in his experience, rewarding things

have happened after he has done so. Of course, you may first
capture attention, and then, when the student looks, reinforce him
for attending. But this not good procedure. Every time you
is

attract the attention of the student (with dramatic television film,

a

for example) you deprive him of one opportunity to learn how

reinforcing may be to pay attention.
it

There are other "special abilities" which can be taught in the

same way. (We are now content simply to measure them.) There
also the possibility of an entirely new analysis of knowledge. My
is

book, Verbal Behavior, was written before had become interested

I

in teaching machines, yet certain parts of are almost handbook

it

in the art of programming. The notions of knowledge and com

munication are reduced to very practical terms. When you say
something to student, in what sense have you communicated
a

anything? How do you bring about this thing called communica

71
tioM or the transfer of ideas? It is often assumed that when you
but all teachers know

it,
tell a student something, he then knows
the assumption untenable. proper analysis of responses

A
to

is
verbal stimuli, spoken, written, or otherwise, will suggest further
developments in instrumental teaching which should pay off far
beyond the present merely practical successes of relatively indiffer
ent machines and materials.
am proud of the success of teaching machines because

it
I

represents an application of basic analysis to technological

a
problem. possible for someone to look at teaching machine
is
It

a
and program and say, "Well, of course, what going on,"

is
see
a

I
and then describe the event in traditional terms. But the fact

is
that traditional ways of describing the processes of instruction
have done nothing about the problem for hundreds of years. Only
through the kind of basic science of behavior which has been
developing in the last fifteen or twenty years could we reach this
kind of application. Only the confidence resulting from the success
of the basic science could mount an effective attack on the status
quo.
further development of the whole enterprise should lead
A

of knowledge and communication.

If
to even better conceptions
this proves to be the case, we shall find ourselves in territory which
no longer capable of being described in traditional terms.
is

72