A teaching machine designed to take over the performance of certain classroom duties has been built by B. Frederick Skinner, professor of Psychology. He has just received a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education to develop the "robot" for teaching elementary languages and science at the college level.
The machine, Skinner explained, is operated by the student. When a lever is pushed, a sentence in English to be translated appears. The student writes his own translation on a strip of paper which slides under a piece of glass, so that the student can see, but not change his answer. Then, the correct translation appears.
If the student has correctly translated the sentence, he pushes a lever which marks the paper as correct and adjusts the machine so that that sentence will only appear once more. During a session with the machine, the student must translate each sentence twice. The machine, Skinner claims, is relatively cheat-proof because a teacher can check the answers on the paper with the mark the machine has registered. There would also be a phonograph for dictation drill.
The machine would not eliminate the need for teachers, Skinner said, but would be designed to relieve the instruction of routine drill. As yet, there is no definite plan for the use of these machines at Harvard or any other college, but he hopes that enough material and machines will be ready for an actual classroom trial a year from now.
Skinner outlined three great advantages to the machine. First, it gives the student an immediate report of whether he is right or wrong. Second, the student can work at his own pace. Third, students can learn "at least twice as fast" as under present teaching methods.
This is not the first such machine which Skinner has invented. Last year he experimented with a machine to teach arithmetic to elementary school students. He emphasized that the machine which he will work on under the grant can be adapted to a large number of subject including the teaching of code.
It is one of a number of grants from the Fund totaling $501,615, given to 34 institutions for the improvement of teaching methods and resources.
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