The Engineered Student: On B. F. Skinner’s Teaching Machine

Psychology professor B. F. Skinner is best known for developing the concept of "operant conditioning," in which a desired behavior is rewarded, therefore reinforcing that behavior. Inside psychological circles, he is more renowned for bringing psychology into the real world, as he dismissed earlier theories of the mind as "magic" when the only thing we can really observe is the behavior that comes from it. Skinner's operant conditioning is easily observed using a Skinner box, a training device designed to dispense food when the subject, a lab rat or a pigeon, performs a desired behavior. In 1953, the professor visited his daughter's fourth grade class and watched as the teacher gave a math lesson. Knowing what he did about the process of learning, he was dismayed by the mistakes he saw, and knew he had to do something. So he designed the teaching machine, which he disclosed at a conference in Pittsburgh.

“The simple fact is that, as a mere reinforcing mechanism, the teacher is out of date,” Skinner told his Pittsburgh colleagues. “This would be true even if a single teacher devoted all her time to a single child, but her inadequacy is multiplied many-fold when she must serve as a reinforcing device to many children at once. If the teacher is to take advantage of recent advances in the study of learning, she must have the help of mechanical devices.”

“He’s kidding,” a professor of education in the audience muttered to a colleague.

He wasn’t.

His teaching machine, Skinner argued, boasted several important features: It gave immediate feedback, and while a whole class could set to work on their devices, each individual student could progress at their own rate. Furthermore, the machine could liberate the teacher from the tedious work of grading.

Skinner got quite a bit of publicity over his teaching machine. The problem was that he was not the first to propose such an idea! Several scientists had been researching and promoting a teaching machine decades before, which caused some scandal in academia. At any rate, these teaching machines have been used in one form or another ever since, from the early mechanical boxes to internet apps. Read about Skinner and the teaching machine at MIT Press Reader. -via Damn Interesting ​

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