ID Meets IT Part 1: A Classroom of One

This is the first post in a series of postings examining historical and contemporary instructional delivery and design models and their implications for instructional technology, hence the title, ID Meets IT.

Individualized instruction may be a familiar buzzword for today’s educators, but its historical roots extend deep into the educational soil.  At a time during social upheaval, cultural revolutions, and questioning of authority, it no surprise that in the early 60’s F.S. Keller devised an unconventional plan to address a problem many teachers still face today: why students refuse to learn. The Keller plan was a dramatic break from the traditional system of instruction in which the teacher delivered the same instruction, to the same group of students, and at the same time, same speed, same order.  Davis (2000) succinctly outlines the system as:

…a plan, which was designed to maximize learning by stressing achievement and positive reinforcement. This approach has come to be known as The Keller Plan, Self-Paced Instruction, or the Personalized System of Instruction. The key elements of the system are:
   •    Clear educational objectives.
   •    Small learning modules with associated achievement tests and immediate feedback
   •    Student self-pacing
   •    Positive reinforcement
   •    Student emphasis on doing rather than listening

Although Davis doesn’t explicitly state the rationale for why PSI will make students want to learn, it’s not too difficult to infer a primary reason. Students that traditionally have difficulty learning won’t be frustrated with unsuccessful attempts at keeping up. Likewise, students who excel academically won’t be bored with the slow pace.

While Keller’s plan was perhaps revolutionary at the time, personalized systems of instruction (PSI) have found several niches in today’s classrooms.  During my undergraduate years, I was a volunteer at the University of Michigan’s Family Housing Center assisting with an afterschool English program helping the children of foreign graduates students learn English. The system in place consisted students working at their own pace on small self-guided activities (games, worksheets, etc) contained within files folders. An assistant assessed their work immediately, a sticker was added to their progress chart, and they were allowed to select a new activity within their leveled range until all similarly color-coded unit activities were completed, after which they were allowed to move on to the next level. In my work as an elementary educator, I’ve personally used, and have known many educators who have also incorporated a watered down version of PSI into centers or individual seat work while the teacher works with a small group of students on a skill they’ve yet to master, on collaborative projects, or on small investigations in which supplies are limited. 

While I believe PSI still plays a limited, supplementary role in the classroom in terms of instructional delivery, one of the biggest trends I see in the re-emergence of PSI is in the field of educational technology. Technology takes the appealing aspects of PSI (self-pace, immediate feedback, emphasis on activity) and makes it both feasible and scalable.  K12, a primary vendor The Florida Virtual School, incorporates a series of self-paced modules for students to work through at their own pace with frequent assessment checks that are conditional for advancement to the next lesson.  On a side note, Moodle, an LMS that is probably familiar to anyone who has taken and online course at the university level, recently included the ability for instructors to include conditional activities. I’ve also seen PSI take a dominant foothold in elementary computer labs and middle schools concerned about standardized test scores. PSI based software packages such as Classworks, Waterford, Study Island and a whole slew of similar programs appeal to these schools because of their emphasis on mastery of specific, concrete, curriculum aligned objectives. Students move at their own pace, are immediately given feedback through quizzes or games, and teachers can easily monitor the progress of an entire class all working on separate skills, an incredibly difficult task in a normal classroom setting. 

Despite these advantages, PSI, both in technology based and traditional classrooms, is not without problems.  Any teacher with a classroom of 20-30 students knows how difficult it can be to monitor, support and provide feedback to students working on the same lesson, let alone 20-30 different lessons. And while technology provides a solution of sorts to this problem, the kind of feedback and support a machine can provide to a child or adult is severely limited. I’ve had the opportunity to both score and write assessment items for Pearson and for my district and quality items the assess higher order thinking skills are very difficult to write, especially when limited to closed responses such as the multiple choice and matching items found in these types of technology programs. The multiple assessment items required are not only difficult to write, but are also very time consuming, as is the preparation and management of a vast quantity of instructional materials. This is one of the reasons I think PSI has become more prevalent in the field of educational technology.

In addition, I also question Davis’ contention that PSI is suited to different learning styles. The very linear, lock-step oriented methods of PSI allow students to move at their own pace, but in the implementations of PSI that I have seen, they are still marching down the same path. Moreover, with the technology-based versions of PSI mentioned above, they are going it alone. PSI in an online environment can be a terribly isolating experience, and not just for distance learners working from computers at home. Walking into a computer lab with 30+ headphone-clad students sitting silently and staring at computers while they cycle through lessons is a somewhat disturbing experience.

A final point needs to be addressed and ties into the two points above. The division of instruction into small, frequently assessed units of distinct objectives, compounded with the method of assessment available through technology or the feasibility of creating assessments, and added to the fact that students will likely be working alone or with an ever changing small group, equals a severely limited range and type of activities (and activities are the emphasis) that can be performed by students. Modeling skills as they are likely to be applied in students’ personal lives or at some point in their careers seems to be a difficult task to ask of PSI. Moreover, while I’ve seen higher order thinking skills addressed in these programs or assessments, it is usually in such an isolated context that it is difficult to apply or transfer that skill into another setting.  

In conclusion, PSI has a place in education, but I would proceed with caution. PSI would be well suited to basic skill remediation or acceleration, but PSI models are a big investment, both online or off. PSI requires a big investment both in the time to develop materials or money to purchase them, and the manpower to monitor and support students or the technology that can do so. I see a lot of school districts seduced into technology packages that follow a PSI model because they are so laser focused on test scores that measure a discrete set of isolated skills, they are blinded to the wider view of how technology is increasingly being used in schools and in daily life to inquire, create, and connect. And online or off, it is these connections with people that further inspire us to create, to spark our curiosity and teach us the art of inquiry.