Setting the Pace: Experiments With Keller's PSI

Abstract

The ideal of self-paced learning, which was introduced nearly 50 years ago by Keller in his Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), has not yet been widely adopted. In spite of its perceived promise of helping students to learn at the speed aligned to their individual backgrounds, motivation, and skills, PSI has been challenging to implement. University teaching practice with weekly plans means that instructors expect students to learn at the same pace. Against this backdrop, this paper reports experiences from deploying PSI in multiple offerings of an introductory programming course at a Scandinavian university over five years. These include variations, such as a buddy system, rightsizing modules, encouraging pacing, alternative targets, intermediate milestones, active coaching, and time management, all primarily aimed at overcoming a key concern associated with PSI, namely, procrastination. The lessons associated with each are described with a view to providing fellow instructors with strategies and options that they can consider for implementing PSI into introductory programming courses.