Skinner fala sobre a Maquina de Ensinar - 1960

These young people are studying in a new way. Class in spelling. It might as well be arithmetic or algebra or grammar or in fact anything involving the use of words or symbols.

Each student is using a teaching machine. A device which creates vastly improved conditions for effective study. What are teaching machines?

How are they used? What can they teach? Who prepares the material they teach?

And how does this material differ from textbooks, lectures, and educational television? What impact will machine teaching have on school organization? Some of these questions can be answered in at least a preliminary way.

I am BF Skinner, professor of psychology at Harvard University. I should like to discuss some of the reasons why studying with the help of a teaching machine is often dramatically effective. With the machine you have just seen in use, the student sees a bit of text or other printed material in a window.

This may be a sentence or two or an equation in arithmetic. Some small part is missing and the student must supply it by writing on exposed strip of paper. His response may be the answer to a question or the solution of a problem, but generally it is simply a symbol or word which completes the material he has just read.

As soon as the student has written his response, he operates the machine and learns immediately whether he is right or wrong. This is a great improvement over the system in which papers are corrected by a teacher where the student must wait perhaps till another day to learn whether or not what he is written is right. Such immediate knowledge has two principal effects.

It leads most rapidly to the formation of correct behavior. The student quickly learns to be right. But there is also a motivating effect.

The student is free of uncertainty or anxiety about his success or failure. His work is pleasurable. He does not have to force himself to study.

A classroom in which machines are being used is usually the scene of intense concentration. One function of a teaching machine then is to give the student a quick report on the adequacy of his response. This is important not only for efficient learning, it generates a high level of interest and enthusiasm.

Another important advantage is that the student is free to move at his own pace. With techniques in which a whole class is forced to move forward together, the bright student wastes time wasting waiting for others to catch up and the slow student who may not be inferior in any other respect is forced to go too fast. Not quite completing one day's assignment, he is even less likely to complete a second and he gets farther and farther behind and often gives up altogether unless remedial steps are taken.

A student who is learning by machine moves at the rate which is most effective for him. The fast student covers a course in a short time, but the slower student by giving more time to the subject can cover the same ground. both learn the material thoroughly.

A third feature of machine teaching is that each student follows a carefully constructed program leading from the initial stage where he is wholly unfamiliar with the subject to a final stage in which he is competent. He does this by taking a large number of very small steps arranged in a coherent order. Each step is so small that he is almost certain to take it correctly.

The material is designed to give the student as much help as possible. He is not in any sense being tested. Instead, helpful hints, suggestions, and prompts maximize the chances that he will be right.