Ogden R. Lindsley

Precision Teaching: By Teachers for Children:

People often state that I developed precision teaching. This is incorrect. I did not develop it. It would be more accurate to say that I founded and coached it. Teachers developed it at my urging by following its founding policies. I still urge teachers to use the powerful methods of free-operant conditioning (often referred to as behavroTal psychology) in their classrooms. This refers to a process of learning in which students are free to respond at their own pace without having restraints placed on them by the limits of the materials or the instructional procedures of the teachers. In following these procedures, teachers went beyond the use of teaching trials to develop the methods of precision teaching.

Precision teaching's unique legacy from B. F. Skinner

Precision Teachings unique legacy from B. F. Skinner was the monitoring system of rate of response and the cumulative response recorder. This legacy is unique because the other instructional systems derived from Skinners work do not use his monitoring method exclusively. Rate of response, cumulative recording and their extension to Precision Teachings standard celeration charting are briefly described. In addition, Precision Teachings nature, history, costs, distribution, inductive data-base, and academic base are briefly described. Skinners legacy to education was a sound behavioral scientific base and his unique legacy to Precision Teaching was self-monitoring for real time decision making by learners and teachers.

The Four Free-Operant Freedoms

This article reviews early free-operant conditioning laboratory research and applications. The seldom-mentioned four free-operant freedoms are described for the first time in detail. Most current behavior analysts do not realize that the freedom to form responses and the freedom to speed responses were crucial steps in designing free-operant operanda in the 1950s. These four freedoms were known by the laboratory researchers of the 1950s to the point that, along with operanda design, Sidman (1960) did not feel the need to detail them in his classic, Tactics of Scientific Research. The dimensions of freedom in the operant were so well understood and accepted in the 1950s that most thought it redundant to use the term free operant. These issues are reviewed in some detail for younger behavior analysts who did not have the opportunity of learning them firsthand.

Can Deficiency Produce Specific Superiority-The Challenge of the Idiot Savant

Specific superior skills have been found in behaviorally retarded persons (idiots savants). Kiyoshi Yamashitas graphic genius is given as an outstanding example. The suggestion is made that we design prosthetic environments not only to restore average behavioral junction to handicapped individuals, but also to develop special skills to the point of superiority. Supporting examples and an interpretation of specific superiority are given.

Is fluency free-operant response-response chaining?

This article briefly reviews behavioral fluency and its 10 products. Fluency development requires three of the four free-operant freedoms: the freedom to present stimuli at the learner’s rhythm, the freedom to form the response, and the freedom to speed at the learner’s maximum frequency. The article closes with several suggestions that fluent performing is really operant response-response (R-R) chaining, and recommends further controlled laboratory research on free-operant R-R chaining.

Overt responding in computer-based training

This experiment compared the extent to which students learned facts included in computer-based-training frames that required an overt response to those that did not. Frames included two types of facts: Some facts had one word missing which had to be supplied by the student (active facts). Other facts had no missing words and required no overt response (passive facts). Each student completed four 14-fact modules in random order. Two of the modules contained frames with all active facts. Each frame in the other two modules contained one active and six passive facts. Paper pretests and posttests showed that students learned twice as many facts when all facts in the module were active than when only one in seven were active. The modules that included passive facts required one-fifth the time to complete than those with only active facts. Students learned more facts per minute of training in one of the two modules that included passive facts than in the two modules with only active facts.

Phonetic, Linguistic, and Sight Readers Produce Similar Learning with Exceptional Children

Three years of computer-stored reading frequencies and celerations yielded average learning pictures for the 94 books in 17 different reading curricula. The median test with both Fishers exact and with chi-square probabilities determined the significance of differences between the distributions of the average learning produced by the books in each curricular series. The pupils ranged from 5 to 21 years of age and included almost all exceptionalities. Major conclusions are: (a) The different curricula are functionally identical: they produce the same learning. (b) The average learning of these exceptional children was the same as that of regular children (x 1.2 per week), (c) Children can learn faster when starting at a low correct frequency (5 per minute), and when starting at high error frequencies (5 to 10 per minute). Strategies for improving learning include: (a) Teachers and children should treat errors as something to be aware of and eliminate, rather than as something to stay away from. (b) Curricula should start with low correct frequencies and high error frequencies, making room for steeper learning of both.