Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

204 The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology
were prompted but as the learner’s performance improved less help was provided. In the end, a
learner would have acquired new behavior.
Skinner’s concept of reinforcement stimulus paved the way for the development of programmed
instruction and outcome-oriented instruction in today’s institutions of learning. The influence of
programmed instruction is still affecting the teaching technologies used in today’s society. Today’s
instructional designers are still using Skinner’s operant conditioning concepts to create courses
that contain measurable behavioral objectives. In addition, traditional instructor-led, computerbased,
and online courses are being built based on the concepts of small frames of instruction,
immediate feedback regardless of correctness of the response, self-pacing, and learner’s response
to knowledge checks. In addition, instructional designers are also designing knowledge checks so
learners compose their answers rather than selecting answers from a set of choices. Instructional
designers creating online courses are also starting to realize that course lessons, modules, and
topics must do more than present blocks of content with quizzes or tests at the end of the instruction
sequence. Depending on operant conditioning, the sequencing of steps is also very critical and is
an important factor to consider in designing online courses. Furthermore, if instruction is to be
effective, learners should be required to respond to what each screen of information presents and
to get feedback on their performance before advancing to the next level of the course. Skinner
strongly cautioned against technology that merely presents information to the learner. Teachers
must be aware of their teaching strategies so that the learner or the student is not merely a passive
receiver of instruction but an active participant in the instructional process. This concept helped
in shifting education’s focus to the outcome behavior of the learner.
Aside from the influence of programmed instructions, Skinner’s operant conditioning concepts
have been applied in classroom management. Hall and Lindzey (1978) have referred to token
economies that have been used extensively in classroom settings with such populations as normal
children, delinquents, and severely retarded children. When students exhibit proper classroom
behaviors like completing assignments, paying attention, and not being late for class, tokens can
be awarded. These tokens can be later exchanged for whatever reinforcement stimulus a particular
student happens to value, whether they are in the form of food, movies, or periods of free play.
In the classroom setting, the systematic and skillful use of reinforcement stimulus can produce
beneficial and dramatic behavioral changes in students.
Skinner (1968), in his book The Technology of Teaching, described the modern classroom as
particularly averse to learning and discussed behaviors in school administration and organization
that were not conducive to learning. These behaviors that Skinner referred to were (a) the
infrequency of reinforcement, (b) the lapse between response and reinforcement, (c) the aversive
stimulation, and (d) the lack of a long series of contingencies for desired behaviors. To offset these
behaviors, teachers must learn to use multiple stimulus control techniques. The other concepts that
Skinner believed could aid teachers in helping students learn were the use of modeling, shaping,
priming, and prompting. Skinner opined that if teachers already had a broad range of teaching
strategies and tactics, then they would always look for additional elements and tools to add to the
intellectual and practical repertory. Teachers can be trained to view teaching as a process that can
be broken down into progressive stages with reinforcements following each stage. However, the
classroom setting provides numerous variables and contingencies that teachers cannot realistically
arrange. Despite this limitation, Skinner believed that operant conditioning could still provide
the means necessary to effectively control human learning by building complex responses out
of many simple responses and associating reinforcement closely in time with the response to be
learned.
Skinner saw the world through the lens of operant reinforcement theory and through the
eyes of a behaviorist. Skinner was a modernist and a believer in the value of a molecular
approach to the study of behavior. He searched for simple elements of behavior to study, and