Teaching Machines or Teachers?

           Both the video and article have mentioned a “significant” technology that has had an impact upon education back in its time, which is the teaching machine, invented by psychologist B.F. Skinner. According to the article “A Social History of Media, Technology and Schooling,” the teaching machine is “basically a punchboard that contained multiple choice test items and the machine would evaluate the students’ responses and repeat the answers until the student selected the correct one” (Domine 4). Based on my prior knowledge about the teaching machines and the article, I come up with the conclusion that the teaching machines are not designated to foster active learning, but rather to produce passive learners who are looking for patterns or tricks in the answers. The teaching machine reminds me of an article that I read before for my method course. The article talks about how an educational program called the IPI (Individually Prescribed Instruction) Mathematics does not work out in teaching basic math skills such as performing operations on fractions and decimals. Students in the program work on math questions on their own, and then the teacher will check their answers using an answer key. One student in the program got through the program by making up his rules for operating on fractions, and the teacher even considered him as one of the advanced students. I realize that the teaching machine and the IPI program are similar in terms of the way it “teaches” the content to the students. Both of them do not really require a teacher, and students are basically “learning” on their own. The teaching machine is absolutely ineffective in teaching Mathematics because similar to the IPI program, students can look for patterns in the answers or use trial and error to get the question correct without understanding the concept. Also, what students end up develop is trial and error skill through drill and practice, rather than critical thinking and problem solving skills. Help students to develop conceptual understanding is the emphasis in teaching Mathematics. I am glad that the teaching machine is no longer in use. I really can’t imagine how students can learn Math using it. In Professor Domine’s article, the interviewee Grace described the teaching machine as “a piece of furniture” (Domine 4) and I think that is a perfect description for it. Even teachers such as Bessie at that time did not like the idea of teaching machines, and chose to ignore them.

            Rather than saying that the teaching machine was designed to help students learn or reduce teachers’ work load, it was designed to produce robot-like passive learners who learn the content through repeated exercises. Although math skills can be improved through repeated practice and exercise, but Math is not entirely about drill and practice. The purpose of teaching math to students is to help them to develop problem solving and critical thinking skills that they can apply in other areas as well. The teaching machine obviously can’t accomplish that since you have unlimited tries to guess the answers, and no thinking is really involved. Therefore, I do not think that the teaching machine is an effective technology in teaching Mathematics.