The first two speakers have just taken us back to the time when Fred Keller and Nat Schoenfeld taught at Columbia University. Let me ask you to stay in this earlier time period for another few moments and to reflect on how you learned to teach. College and university faculty tend to profess, that is, to lecture to groups of students, so this style of teaching tends to be perpetuated. To be sure, not everyone lectures exclusively, except at conventions. We ask questions of our students; we ask for questions from our students; we show slides and overlays and films and videos and make use of computer demonstrations; we break classes into smaller groups for discussion; we may consult the APA's Handbook of Teaching Activities; and, finally, we test our students perhaps once or twice a semester and reward the performance of most of them with a grade somewhere above an F. If you learned from Keller and Schoenfeld, you ought to be skilled in the techniques of behavior modification, that is, in the application of the laws of reinforce- ment in order to change behavior. And so the question must be asked: In your teaching, are you applying the laws of reinforcement to the best advantage? Are we this evening? How much of this symposium will you remember tomorrow, or next week? One plus for me is that an expanded version of this talk will be placed on the home page for the Psychology Department at Lafayette College. If I am speaking too rapidly or too slowly for you to process the information to your best advantage, or if you forget something you heard, or if you doze off for a moment, you can log onto the World Wide Web tomorrow via the internet and read, and re-read, my talk until you have mastered it.

Suppose it really were the times of Keller and Schoenfeld at Columbia and you are about to embark for the first time on an academic career. Would you take the initiative to investigate what is known about teaching? If they were available, would you search the World Wide Web or PsycScan for information? Would you get around to reading journal articles and books on teaching?

Division 2 of the American Psychological Association has its own journal, ToP, Teaching of Psychology. There are also two fairly recent books which, from their titles, ought to be of some help: Teaching Psychology in America: A History, edited by Puente, Matthews, and Brewer and published in 1992 by the APA; and Teaching Psychology: A Handbook: Readings from "Teaching of Psychology," edited by Hartley and McKeachie and published in 1990 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bill McKeachie's Teaching Tips is still available in its most recent edition and every introductory textbook in psychology has its package of goodies designed to get you to select it from among the scores of such books in print.

There is a world of information available at your fingertips, literally. Since you are behaviorists, perhaps you would start your search by using key words from behavioral psychology. Perhaps you would even combine some key words and search simultaneously for the interface between teaching and learning since behavior change comes with learning, which may or may not be closely related to teaching.

An article by Barry Schwartz in the January, 1997, issue of Psychological Science, begins this way:

"We live in a culture and an age in which the influence of scientific technology is obvious and overwhelming. As I word process this document, later to send it via modem to get hard copy from the laser printer in my office, my microwave oven is defrosting tonight's dinner, my video casette recorder (VCR) is taping a movie on cable television for time-shifted viewing, and my digital compact disc player is delivering background music of extraordinary quality. All around me, people are having high-tech medical scans, fetuses are being monitored, genes are being spliced, organs are being transplanted, atoms are being smashed to provide power, and computers are "smartening up" people's lives. None of this is news. Adjusting to ever-advancing technology is a brute fact of contemporary life. Some of us do it grudgingly, and some of us do it enthusiastically, but everyone does it. The technology of VCR's, nuclear power, and microwaves -- what might be called thing technology -- is what most of us think of when we think about the modern impact of science."

But behavioral science can, and has, produced another kind of technology, instructional technology, that could have just as big an impact on us as thing technology. There is programmed instruction, such as the Holland and Skinner text, not to be confused with teaching machines; there is Guided Design; there is PSI. Some of us have tried one or more of these enthusiastically, but not everyone has; and the vast majority of people in higher education, psychologists included, oppose them, even forbid their use if they are in a position to do so.

In your search for help as a beginning teacher, sooner or later you might run across some articles on the Personalized System of Instruction, or to many of us, The Keller Method. Your search ought to lead you to articles by Jim Kulik and his colleagues. There have been hundreds of research studies performed on the relative merits of different methods of instruction. Kulik, et al. have published several outcome studies using meta-analysis. Their analyses show clearly that PSI is the only method to show any differences with other methods, in terms of end-of-course performance. Consistently, students in a PSI course learn more, and retain more for longer periods of time, than do students in any other style of instruction, including lecture methods, lecture/discussion methods, lecture/demonstration methods, and small group discussion methods, while none of these others differs from any of the others. It is almost time to look closely at PSI, The Keller Method.

Unfortunately, if your search were to begin and end with the two books noted above, you might never look any further into PSI. Except for a meta- analysis article by Kulik, et al., which does not give much information about how to use PSI, the book edited by Hartley and McKeachie misrepresents PSI. From the 16 volumes of ToP available in 1990, these editors selected three articles with PSI in their titles, Kulik's and two others, neither of which is even close to Fred Keller's PSI. There are dozens of legitimate articles in ToP on PSI, so it is not clear why the editors selected these two. The book edited by Puente, Matthews, and Brewer, some 551 pages in length, has a total of four pages on PSI, within the writings of three different authors. One of these authors says that "enthusiasm for PSI has diminished;" no argument there, but not of much use to a neophyte. Another author quoted Fred Keller out of context and concluded that "Keller later recanted his own teaching method." To the best of my knowledge, Fred did no such thing, but a naive reader might never look any further. The third author reports a wide ranging interview with Bill McKeachie who began his very brief reference to PSI with praise: "I think the thing that really took over was Fred Keller's PSI. It was very popular and effective, certainly more effective for learning than the large lecture." Had he stopped there, perhaps you would look further into this mysterious system. However, McKeachie went on to say the following: "In many cases it (PSI) was taught with true-false and multiple-choice testing so the approach addressed very low level kinds of learning." Let me read that again: "In many cases it (PSI) was taught with true-false and multiple-choice testing so the approach addressed very low level kinds of learning." (Underlining added) This is a terribly unfair criticism of PSI, or of any method of instruction. It ignores the fact that any approach or method can address any kind of learning; and it ignores the fact that vast numbers of professors in lecture courses, especially large introductory courses, test almost exclusively by using objective test items which come free with the majority of introductory textbooks whose Test Banks are filled with low-level, volume-specific, objective items.

There is nothing in PSI, or in any other method of instruction, which requires the use of objective tests. Nor is there anything degrading about using objective tests, if the items are well written and test higher-order objectives. George Semb, an early and long-time user of PSI, wrote an article with Reboy, "PSI and Critical Thinking," which was published in 1991 by ToP. They conclude their article this way: "Finally, as an instructional delivery system, PSI cannot be held accountable for what is taught in a given course. That responsibility lies with course designers and their willingness to create objectives that emphasize higher order skills and whose materials both teach and assess those skills." For an honest and fair critique of the teaching of psychology, or of any discipline, "PSI" can, and should be replaced in the above quotation by each and every delivery system that is being used or has ever been used, from Socrates to the present. To condemn PSI because some of its users tested with objective items is unfair, to say the least. It is time to talk about Fred Keller and PSI, just in case some of you did start to look into it and were turned off by what you found.

In the spring of 1968, I read the article by Fred Keller with the title: "Goodbye, Teacher." In this article, which appeared in Volume 1, #1, of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Fred described a course he had designed and taught, along with Gil Sherman, first at the University of Brazilia, and later at Arizona. This article changed my life, really drastically for about 12 years, but permanently, to a lesser degree. I was bored with teaching the way I had been taught, the way I and everyone else was teaching; I was sure the students were equally bored -- they certainly behaved in a bored manner. Also, I was very disturbed to have students in Psychology 2 who had received a C or D in Psychology 1, and then students in Psychology 3 who had received another C or D in Psychology 2. I was ready for something new.

The five essential features of a personalized course, as presented by Fred in this initial article, appear on the handout. They are:

"(1) The go-at-your-own-pace feature, which permits a student to move through the course at a speed commensurate with his ability and other demands upon his time.

(2) The unit-perfection requirement for advance, which lets the student go ahead to new material only after demonstrating mastery of that which preceded.

(3) The use of lectures and demonstrations as vehicles of motivation, rather than as sources of critical information.

(4) The related stress upon the written word in teacher-student communication; and, finally:

(5) The use of proctors, which permits repeated testing, immediate scoring, almost unavoidable tutoring, and a marked enhancement of the personal-social aspect of the educational process." (italics in the original)

Let me elaborate on these features by describing to you the Introductory Course in Psychology at Lafayette College, as it was organized and run by me for 12 years. When I spoke with Fred in 1968, he did his best to talk me out of it, but his caution was no match for my naive enthusiasm. I received permission from my department head and the dean of the college to use department funds to pay student proctors. During the summer, I wrote to several upper-level psychology majors to enlist their service as paid proctors. I selected text books. I divided the text materials into 20 Units, each one roughly a textbook chapter in length. And I wrote unit tests -- four tests for each unit, intended to be equal in difficulty and coverage. I prepared Proctor Books which contained information about PSI, with copies of all unit tests and answers to the questions. I included suggestions for using only positive reinforcement during proctoring sessions.

The fall semester began with 245 unsuspecting students and eight Proctors showing up at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning for class in Pardee Auditorium, a large room which seated some 500 people. I described the format of the course to the students, gave them a course description and sets of behavioral objectives, told them there would be some optional lectures later in the semester and to watch the bulletin board for dates and other course information. Then I told them that this was the last required class for the semester, except for the final exam and weekly laboratory meetings, and I dismissed them. What had been 245 unsuspecting students were now 245 incredulous and suspicious students.

Beginning the following day, and every weekday afternoon thereafter, the Auditorium was "open" for unit testing from 4 - 6 p.m. Tests were kept in a file on the stage up front. The Proctors sat in one of the back side sections, a couple of seats away from the isle. Tests were taken in the front sections. Students studied or simply waited in the back center section for a chance to take a test -- with only eight proctors, we learned very quickly that it was safer all around to have students wait to take a test rather than wait to have it graded. When a student finished taking a test, the test proper was returned to me and the student was sent to a proctor to have it graded, a process that took anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes. It was a fascinating scene, as the proctors read and graded a short answer essay question, scored the objective items quickly, read the answers to short questions, talked to the student, tutored the student if necessary, and, no matter what the score on the test, always provided some positive reinforcement to the student, such as "Nice going;" "Good try;" or, "Your essay answer was really good." Passing any unit test required a grade of 95%, my criterion for mastery; anything less necessitated coming back and taking a different form of the same test.

I began the semester with behavioral objectives, four supposedly equal tests, and complete proctor materials for the first seven units. On the eighth day of the semester, one student wanted a Unit 8 test. The rest of that semester was hectic, trying to write four equal tests for each of the remaining 13 units, and keep ahead of the students. This one student was shrewd: he knew he could procrastinate in all his other courses and then cram for mid-term exams; so, he was going to get Psychology 1 completed before mid-terms started in his other courses. The auditorium was very quiet around mid-terms; on the other hand, too many students put off taking any tests until around Thanksgiving, and then it became really hectic as many of them wanted to complete the entire set of 20 units in the final 2 weeks of the term.

I did give some lectures. I wanted to talk about some advanced issues in animal learning and I waited until about 50 students had completed the units on classical and operant conditioning. Then I put a notice on the bulletin board and sent a personal invitation to those 50 students saying that I would be giving a lecture at some specific time, but that attendance was contingent on having passed Unit 8. About 15 of the students came. A little later I wanted to talk about some issues in intelligence; three students came, even though well over 100 were "qualified" to attend. I stopped offering lectures and began to wonder how many students would attend anyone's classes if they were not required to do so. It never occurred to me that I was a poor lecturer.

What I did discover was the power my course contingencies had over the students. In no other course at the college was a student sure of his grade. Some faculty put +'s and -'s on midterm exams or papers, gave a final, and the grade was a total surprise to the student. Some faculty graded on a curve, and studying was no guarantee of a good grade. Some faculty gave only a final with no hint as to what constituted a grade of A or B or C. On the other hand, I guaranteed to any and every student that, if he passed the 20 units, all at 95% or better, and then earned a 95 or higher on the final exam, that he would receive an A for the course. You have no idea how powerful that commitment was to the students, nor how much trouble I began to get into when my first set of grades consisted of 85% A's among the 245 students, some B's, and a few of everything else, including several F's and WD's. The Registrar was dumbfounded; the Dean was furious; the President called me in and we argued, for years, about the meaning of a Lafayette grade and grade-inflation. I tried to convince him with hard evidence that every student had, in fact, earned an A on every one of the 20 unit tests and on the final exam. When word got out to other faculty members, the Psychology Department was the talk of the campus, and it was not positive talk. To the credit of my department head, the dean, and the president, my PSI courses lasted for 12 years and then ended, but not because of pressures from above. Unfortunately, such freedom and dignity have not been the rule at most other colleges.

Fred Keller called me near the end of my first semester, just about when the final crunch was on. He said he was only curious, but I think I heard him smile when I told him some of my problems. There was to be a paper session on PSI at the Midwestern Meetings in April, 1969, in Chicago, would I care to give a paper reporting on my course? So, I spent my Christmas vacation, which at that time was about 10 days, writing a description of Psychology 1 at Lafayette College. There were five papers, one with two authors; Fred Keller was the seventh person in the room. The other four papers were all similar to mine, descriptions of a PSI course; all four were courses in basic learning. The course at Lafayette was the first, and at the time, the only known survey course anywhere using PSI. This did not last long; within the next two years, hundreds of courses were developed, not only in psychology, but in practically every discipline -- physics, engineering, English, foreign languages, mathematics, religion, philosophy, and more.

On September 6, 1971, at the APA convention in Washington, D. C., there was an afternoon session devoted to honoring Fred Keller and PSI. There was standing room only in the grand ballroom of the convention hotel. There were four speakers, to be followed by Fred who would serve as discussant. I was speaker number four with a talk entitled: "Problems in the Implementation of a Course in Personalized Instruction."

I broke my topic into four parts: Problems arising prior to the actual conduct of the course; Problems arising as the course becomes operative; Problems arising as the course becomes known (I might have said famous or infamous); and, Problems in education perhaps solvable by behavioral analysis. My talk turned out to be a bombshell. When Fred Keller responded to the four talks, he worked mine over. But what was perceived initially as an attack on PSI, which it was not, very quickly became popular, especially among PSI users, including Fred. What was already happening, and would happen even more in the near future, was the proliferation of PSI courses by people who did not understand behavioral analysis, people who threw courses together for the wrong reasons. And the reputation of PSI was beginning to suffer as more and more "failures" appeared. Fred himself was very popular and had many more speaking requests than he could fill. He began to ask others to take his place, and I gave some 20 talks in a two to three year period, all over the country, all standing-in for Fred. There were annual PSI conferences with hundreds attending, as well as workshops, a Newsletter, and later a Journal of Personalized Instruction.

In 1975, the publisher of the one of the best selling introductory texts in psychology asked me to write PSI materials for its up-coming revised edition. A junior colleague and I wrote a Student Study Guide and an Instructor's Manual in PSI, the first ones to appear. A year later, almost every publisher had similar materials, most of them written by people who knew little or nothing about PSI or behavioral analysis. PSI's reputation was damaged severely over the next few years by the greed of the publishers and the ignorance of authors who, as psychologists, should have known better.

In the spring of 1976, a group of 25 "experts" in PSI was assembled, split into 5 groups of 5 people each, for the express purpose of writing a book on PSI: The State of the Art. We began by writing back and forth and then convening in Austin, Texas, in late summer to write the book over a long weekend. Which we did, although the book was never published.

In the spring of 1980, I took a sabbatical leave, entrusting my PSI course to a couple of replacement faculty members. When I returned, I decided very quickly that it was time to stop offering the course, for several reasons. One major reason was that the course was in shambles; it had not been conducted well. A second reason was that it was necessary to write a whole new set of tests since the security of the current set had been compromised. I had already revised my tests twice before, as textbooks had been revised, and I was not looking forward to ending my sabbatical leave by spending the summer writing a fourth set of tests. A third reason was the existence of a lot of friction within the department. Several junior colleagues had been upset for several years with PSI; they wanted to teach introductory psychology, but not my way. The final reason for abandoning PSI was that I was to become department head, a chore I had performed once before and knew how demanding it was.

I'm afraid that many people viewed the end of PSI at Lafayette as the result of a failure of the system. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my opinion. Students went into upper level courses knowing more than they had in previous years. Not only had all of them passed Psychology 1 and 2 with A's, they had not procrastinated most of the semester and then crammed for a mid-term and a final, only to forget 90% of the content within 48 hours. Even more important, the study habits of many students were improved. Students had to discipline themselves to keep on target; no one called them up to see where they were or why they were not taking tests. Most importantly, they had been through Psychology 1 and 2 with little or no aversive control. My proctors, almost without exception, were excellent. Not only had they learned the material far better than the students; they had learned how to provide reinforcement to their colleagues and how to ask questions, how to probe, how to "fail" a student on a unit test and be thanked in return.

PSI in its pure form is no longer in existence at Lafayette College. It is no longer as popular and widespread as it was in the 1970's. The Journal died for lack of funding. There are no PSI conferences these days, although there are occasional papers and articles on PSI. A symposium at EPA last year, Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) Re-visited, drew a very small audience. The Keller Method is largely a memory these days, sadly so in my opinion. The method's demise elsewhere where it had been used seems to be a function of negative administrative actions. But it's mistreatment in sources intended to help the teacher of psycholgy is also part of the problem.

I find it very sad that political and financial reasons dominate the end of PSI. Two years ago, Robert Allan and I submitted an article in which we challenged three books on teaching, two of them those I mentioned earlier. All three contained incorrect statements about PSI. The APA journal rejected our article, but you can find it on our home page.

Fred Keller lived a life as a professor, mentor, and friend, using positive reinforcement consistently. PSI is a very special, personalized system of instruction which capitalizes on these same principles. Student feedback from PSI courses has been almost 100% positive -- almost everyone, students, proctors, and faculty, enjoys the experience. Research supports its advantages in both learning and memory over other systems which continue to dominate higher education. I am no longer a missionary for PSI, nor was Fred Keller in his later years. But the Keller Method deserves to be given a fair chance, especially by those who are knowledgable in behavior analysis, and it deserves a better press than it has been given in materials designed to help teachers of psychology. As Barry Schwarz said: everyone adjusts to ever- advancing "thing technology." Why is it that we, psychologists in higher education, are not trying to adjust to instructional technologies instead of perpetuating almost exclusively methods which had their origins in the Middle Ages?