Skinner Machines Make Classroom Like Kitchen

In a modern kitchen, all the cook must do is read the recipe, mix the ingredients, set the stove, and give the pot an occasional stir. To psychologist B.F. Skinner, the classroom is like a modern kitchen and "there is no reason why the school room should be any less mechanized than ... the kitchen." The teacher should remain, but only as cook.

But unlike many educators, Skinner has not stopped at theory. He has taken the first step in mechanizing the classroom by building a teaching machine. Ten years in the laboratory with pigeons, rats and other lower organisms, studying the learning process, convinced him that the basic conditions of the process can be fulfilled by machines. In fact, he says, his machine with its levers, disks and automatic marker teaches certain things more intelligibly than most teachers.

What did Skinner learn from his pigeons and rats that he incorporated in his machine? He discovered that "students" learn best when they know immediately whether or not they are right--and that they do better when they are right all or most of the time. Being allowed to work at their own rate (which Skinner considers to be at least twice as fast on his machine as in the classroom) and to make progress by small steps also aid them. The machine satisfies all these criteria. The last of them, however, presents the real problem for Skinner and his researchers.

His task for the next year with his grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education will be to determine just what material is necessary and suitable for an elementary college-level course in a language and a science. For a language, Skinner will need the help of experts to scale and translate the material. His experimental "animals" will be graduate students who need to learn a language for their Ph.D. examinations. Besides developing and perfecting the materia, Skinner will have to build enough machines for an actual classroom trial when the grant runs out a year from July 1.

Modern Education's Failure

The exact fate of his machines is unknown. He hopes to find a college somewhere, possibly Harvard, which would consent to conduct a test run.

The motivation for Skinner's work in the field seems to come from what he considers to be a great failure in modern education. He spelled out his anxieties in an article for the Harvard Educational Review in Spring, 1954, called the "Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching."

First, he believes, the forces which determine the students' attitudes towards their work are at fault. Fear boredom and other anxieties keep the students' minds away from the business of learning. Half a century ago, he writes, "for the immediate purposes of education the child acted to avoid or escape punishment. It was part of the reform movement known as progressive education to make the positive consequences more immediately effective, but anyone who visits the lower grades of the average school today will observe that a change has been made, not from averse to positive control, but from one form of averse stimulation to another.... In this welter of averse consequences, getting the right answer is in itself an insignificant event, any effect of which is lost amid the anxieties, the boredom, and the aggressions which are the inevitable by-products of averse control."

Second, the teachers, even under the best conditions, fail to give the student an immediate knowledge of his accomplishment. "It can easily be demonstrated," Skiner explained in psychychological jargon, "that, unless explicit mediating behavior has been set up, the lapse of only a few seconds between response and reinforcement destroys most of the effect."

In the case of arithmetic, Skinner complained that "modern children simply do not learn arithmetic quickly or well.... The glimpse of a column of figures, not to say an algebraic symbol or an integral sign, is likely to set off--not mathematical behavior--but a reaction of enixiety, guilt, or fear.

"The teacher is no happier about this than the pupil. Denied the opportunity to control via the birch rod, quite at sea as to the mode of operation of the few techniques at her disposal, she spends as little time as possible on drill subjects and eagerly subscribes to philosophies of education which emphasize material of greater inherant interest."

But the requirements for proper education "are probably incompatible with the current realities of the classroom." As a remedy, he suggests "we have every reason to expect, therefore, that the most effective control of human learning will require instrumental aid. The simple fact is that, as a mere reinforcing mechanism, the teacher is out of date."

These criticisms of the teaching method apply, of course, in a general way, to college teaching, especially of language at the elementary level.

Skinner answers the standard objections to mechanized education. First, far from treating the child "as a mere animal," the machines would be resigned to relieve the teacher of routine, but necessary, drill. The teacher would not be replaced, but "may begin to function, not in lieu of a cheap machine, but through intellectual, cultural, and emotional contacts of that distinctive sort which testifiy to his status as a human being."

As for the practicality of mechanizing schools, he says that the machines--even a large number of them--would not strain our economy. "A country which annually produces millions of refrigerators, dish-washers, automatic washing-machines, automatic clothes-dryers, and automatic garbage disposers can certainly afford the equipment necessary to educate its citizens to high standards of competence in the most effective way."

Skinner maintains "There is a simple job to be done.... The necessary techniques are known. The equipment needed can easily be provided. Nothing stands in the way but cultural inertia. But what is more characteristic of America than an unwillingness to accept the traditional as inevitable? We are on the threshold of an exciting and revolutionary period, in which the scientific study of man will be put to work in man's best interests. Education must play its part. It must accept the fact that a sweeping revision of educational practice is possible and inevitable. When it has done this, we may look forward with confidence to a school system which is aware of the nature of its tasks, secure in its methods, and generously supported by the informed and effective citizens whom education itself will create."

Pulleys, Levers, and Chains

Right now, his latest machine is on workbench in the Psychology Department's machine shop in the basement of Memorial Hall. It is better described as a device than as a machine. It consists of a small wooden box with several small windows in the top, and a lever in front. Inside, there is maze of pulleys, levers, and chains and an aluminum disk about the size of a phonograph turn-table. It's really very simple, however.

On the disk, the student places another disk containing sentences to be translated or numbers to add or whatever. These are made visible one by one through one of the windows when the lever is moved. At the same time, a strip of paper comes into reach on which the student writes his answer. When he presses the lever again, the answer slides under a piece of glass so that it is visible but cannot be changed while the correct answer appears in another window. If the student's answer is correct, he moves the lever which marks the paper as correct and adjusts the machine so that the sentence appears once more. During a session with the machine, the student must answer each question correctly twice.

There will also be a phonograph in the language machine which reads a sentence to be translated to give the student dictation drill.

The progress of a student could be checked by seeing how many problems he had to answer in order to get each one correct twice. In college a talented student in language coming in on his own time could presumably come in often early in the term, work quickly, and thereby get rid of his requirement.

A term of an elementary language course might take as many as 10,000 sentences to translate, but Skinner estimates that a student could finish two disks (each with 60 sentences) in about 50 minutes: this would mean about 1,000 per week for the average student.

There might have to be a test at the end of the course, he conceded, but ultimately "we want to get away from marking."

The machine is virtually cheat-proof. If a wrong answer is marked correct by a student, the teacher can discover it; and, of course, someone might watch the student at the machine, which could also be set up in a library where a clerk could give out the disks.

What are the other applications of such machines? Skinner claims they are not restricted to languages and science, though he hopes that many languages will be covered eventually. In fact, last year Skinner tested out a similar machine on elementary school children to teach them arithmetic. The major difference at that level was that the machine had an automatic marking device.

On it, he scaled the problems so that students would get most of them correct, even giving them hints. For example, he would use larger or colored numbers in the more difficult problems. As the student advanced, the differences between the distinctions would become less and less. In a language, he says he might give words that rhyme to help in translation. "They might hit the right answer for the wrong reason, but eventually they would learn the right reason, too." Far from fearing the machine, Skinner says, "the children love it. It gives them no anxieties."

He envisions the use of such machines to teach anything that can be taught by rote, although he doesn't want to see them restricted to such uses. He thinks, for example, that the army might use them to teach coding and communication in general where a fast and accurate response is necessary.

Skinner claims that the person who adapts the machine to a particular field doesn't need to know the field so much as he must be familiar with the methodology in teaching it.

Another machine Skinner has conceived would have a card-puncher and keyboard, possibly containing all the letters of the alphabet and all the numbers, which could be used to teach spelling, arithmetic, and, perhaps, other subjects. But its design would have to be left to engineers. Skinner will not attempt it himself.

Whether the machine age will ever reach its iron tenacles into the classrooms of schools and colleges--including Harvard--is impossible to predict; but the Fund for the Advancement of Education has made certain that for at least another year, in the basement of Memorial Hall, machines will teach men; matter will rule mind