About seventy educators gathered in Ottawa late in November for the Canadian Teachers' Federation seminar on programmed learning, and its future in Canada. Much of what they had to say should interest psychologists.At the risk of boring those of you who know enough about programmed learning, after reading the recent article in Psychological Bulletin 1 (or the Scientific American 2 , or the Saturday Evening Post?, or Better Homes and Gardens*, or whatever it is you read), let's begin this paper, provoked by the seminar discussions, with a brief description of programmed learning.The learner is presented with learning material arranged in a logical sequence of little packets of information (Principle of Small Steps). Steps are sometimes framed as an incomplete sentence, and sometimes end with a question. The student is instructed to complete the sentence or answer the question before going on to the next step (Principle of Active Responding). He discovers immediately whether his response is correct (Principle of Immediate Confirmation). He is expected to work at his own speed (Principle of Self-Pacing), a factor which obviously creates an administrative problem in grade-organized school curricula. Learning is said to proceed rapidly and efficiently.Presumably, any subject matter that leads logically to specifiable terminal behaviour or to a specifiable training objective can be programmed. Published, or in preparation, are programmes on fundamentals of English grammar and usage, effective executive practices, trigonometry, etiquette, Skinner's approach to learning, inductive reasoning, and understanding modern poetry, to name a few.The development of a programme is not to be taken lightly. The procedure is quite like psychological test development. It involves planning the programme hi terms of logical organization of content and desired terminal behaviour or training objectives, planning in great detail the best way to present each topic, and how to relate it to what has gone before and what will follow, writing possibly thousands of items, or frames, trying out and revising short sequences, on the basis of performance of a few subjects, and, finally, trying out and revising the entire programme with samples representative of the population with which the programme will be used (Principle of Student Testing). Someone at the seminar mentioned that one programme was revised seventy-seven times before it was judged ready for final publication. The successful programmer needs a lot of free time, easy access to subjects, and, above all, tenacity in the face of tedium.
