Abstract
B.F. Skinner’s 1958 paper, Teaching Machines, had a powerful influence on my own and many others’ approach to designing instruction. The key features of teaching machines included: a focus on student recall, instead of simple recognition; promoting progress in small steps to enable student understanding; ensuring continuous interaction with the program; making certain, through shaping and fading of prompts, that the right answer is given; and reinforcing correct responding through immediate feedback.. Skinner also taught us to incorporate a specific set of features while designing our instruction. Although a few practical issues, such as time and cost, required our adjusting a few of those features, we have been able to adhere to the most critical ones. Those applications have accelerated learning and performance among an extraordinarily large cohort of students.
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