Skinner, B. F.

Harvard psychologist

Burrhus F. Skinner — Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning (1960)

Andrea Cirla · May 31, 2026 · partial coverage

• B. F. Skinner
• teaching machines
• programmed learning
• behaviorism
• immediate feedback
• individualized instruction
• Sidney Pressey
• Norman Crowder
• Robert Glaser
• educational technology

Coverage note: full (about eighteen minutes; automatic English YouTube captions, mostly clean with a few recognition errors on names; the narration is scripted and uninterrupted)

Core ideas

What a teaching machine does. Skinner describes a device that shows a short piece of text with a small part missing; the student writes the missing word, then operates the machine to find out at once whether he was right. He claims two effects of this immediate knowledge of results: it leads fastest to the formation of correct behavior, and it removes the anxiety of waiting for a teacher's correction, so that study becomes pleasurable and classrooms using machines show intense concentration. A second advantage is that each student moves at his own pace instead of being held back or rushed with the whole class. A third is the program itself: a carefully built sequence of very small, coherent steps, with hints and prompts so that the student is almost always right (programs where the average student is right 95% of the time), and the student advances only after mastering what precedes. Skinner estimates that the average grade-school or high-school student can cover about twice as much material in the same time as in a traditional classroom, and insists that "there is no magic": it is the author of the program, not the machine, who teaches.

Variants and early evidence. Lumsdaine traces the idea to Sidney Pressey's multiple-choice machines at Ohio State and describes the shift to constructed responses on long programmed sequences. He contrasts Skinner's tiny-step frames (the first frames of a high-school physics program, about 30 steps to a general rule in ten to thirty minutes) with Norman Crowder's "scrambled" books, where larger pages end in a question and a wrong answer sends the reader to a remedial page. Programs are tried out on students and revised cumulatively; David Klaus's roughly 3,000 frames for six weeks of high-school physics were tried in fifteen Pennsylvania schools, with substantial gains even in book form. Applications include military and vocational training, audiovisual machines for first graders, and computer-driven devices still used only as research tools.

Implications for schools. Glaser expects programmed learning to build habits of concentration, make successful learning itself rewarding, serve both slow and gifted students, and perhaps let pupils finish standard courses earlier. He rejects the idea that machines will replace teachers: freed from routine, teachers could do more discussion, inspiration and encouragement of creativity, which "bring a new dignity to the teaching profession". He urges practical trials before wide adoption, and raises open questions about organization, school buildings, and who will write programs (content specialists with experimental psychologists, schools or commercial publishers). The film closes on the suggestion that the school of the future could teach ways of thinking and non-verbal skills, extending capacities now taken as innate.

Excerpts