About the Work
“Teaching Machines” is a seminal scientific article by B. F. Skinner, published in the journal Science on October 24, 1958. At the time of writing, Skinner held the position of Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. The article’s subtitle frames its central thesis: that devices which arrange optimal conditions for self-instruction emerge directly from the experimental study of learning. The work is not a lengthy book but a substantial and influential paper that lays out the theoretical foundations, practical designs, and educational philosophy behind the teaching machine movement. It presents a systematic argument for a technological revolution in education, grounded in the behavioral science of reinforcement, and it describes in considerable detail the specific machines Skinner and his colleagues built, the programming techniques they developed, and the results of their early classroom trials. The article serves as both a progress report on ongoing research and a manifesto calling for a fundamental rethinking of how education is delivered.
“From the experimental study of learning come devices which arrange optimal conditions for self-instruction.”
Context
Skinner wrote at a moment of perceived crisis and opportunity in American education. He opens by observing that more people than ever before want an education, and that this demand simply cannot be met by the conventional response of building more schools and training more teachers. The post-war baby boom, combined with rising expectations for universal and extended schooling, had created pressures that traditional methods were straining to accommodate. In any other field, Skinner notes, such increased demand would have triggered the introduction of labor-saving capital equipment. Education, however, had reached this stage late, and he attributes this delay to a fundamental misconception about the nature of the educational task.
The technological context was also shifting. With the advent of television, audio-visual aids were being reexamined with fresh interest. Film projectors, television sets, phonographs, and tape recorders were beginning to enter American schools and colleges. Skinner is careful to distinguish these devices from his own project. Audio-visual aids, he argues, serve essentially one function of the teacher: presenting material clearly and interestingly. They supplement or supplant lectures, demonstrations, and textbooks, but they contribute little to the productive interchange between teacher and student that occurs in small classrooms or tutorials. Indeed, Skinner warns that much of that interchange had already been sacrificed to teach large numbers of students, and there was a real danger it would be wholly obscured if equipment designed simply to present material became widespread, reducing the student to a passive receiver of information.
The intellectual context for Skinner’s work was the behaviorist tradition in psychology, which he was then transforming. He notes that earlier attempts at teaching machines, particularly those of Sidney L. Pressey in the 1920s, had failed to catch on partly because they were ahead of the psychological theory of their time. The study of human learning in Pressey’s era was dominated by the “memory drum” and devices for studying forgetting. Researchers observed the rate of learning but did little to change it. Theories of “frequency” and “recency” and principles of “massed and spaced practice” were concerned with the conditions under which responses were remembered, not with the active construction of new behavior. Pressey’s machines, Skinner argues, were essentially versions of the memory drum—primarily testing devices used after learning had already occurred elsewhere. By the 1950s, however, Skinner’s own experimental work with lower organisms had produced a much more sophisticated understanding of the learning process, one that emphasized the discovery and control of the variables of which learning is a function. This new science of behavior, with its focus on arranging “contingencies of reinforcement,” provided the theoretical foundation that Pressey lacked.
Structure of the Book
The article is organized as a continuous argument, moving from the general problem of educational demand, through a historical review of Pressey’s pioneering but flawed efforts, to a detailed exposition of Skinner’s own approach and machines. It then proceeds to a lengthy discussion of programming techniques, illustrated with concrete examples from arithmetic, poetry, geography, foreign language, and high-school physics. The latter half of the article addresses objections to the method, reports on the first large-scale trial of the machines in a university course, and concludes with a vision of how teaching machines might transform the roles of teachers, students, and the very structure of schooling. The structure is thus both historical and logical: it establishes the failure of past attempts, explains the new science that makes success possible, demonstrates the practical application of that science, defends the approach against its critics, and projects its future implications.
Inside the Book
The article begins with Skinner’s diagnosis of education’s predicament. The demand for education is unprecedented, and the conventional response—more schools, more teachers—is insufficient. Education must become more efficient, and this efficiency must come from revised curricula, improved textbooks, and improved classroom techniques. Skinner notes that education has been slow to adopt labor-saving capital equipment, and he suspects this is due to a misconception of what education is for. The audio-visual aids then entering schools, while valuable for presenting material, do not address the core of teaching, which lies in the productive interchange between teacher and student. The danger is that these presentation devices will become widespread and make the student a passive receiver, further eroding the interactive element of instruction.
Skinner then turns to the history of Pressey’s teaching machines. In the 1920s, Sidney L. Pressey designed several machines for the automatic testing of intelligence and information. In using the device, the student would refer to a numbered item in a multiple-choice test and press the button corresponding to his first choice. If he was right, the device moved to the next item; if wrong, the error was tallied and he continued until he found the correct answer. Pressey recognized that such machines could do more than test and score—they could teach. He understood that when an examination is corrected and returned after a delay, behavior is not appreciably modified. The immediate report from a self-scoring device, however, could have an important instructional effect. Pressey also saw that machines would increase efficiency by allowing each student to proceed at his own rate. In a small classroom, the teacher moves too slowly for the faster students and too quickly for the slower ones; the fast are penalized, the slow are poorly taught and punished by criticism.
Despite the promise of what Pressey called the “industrial revolution in education,” it refused to come about. By 1932, Pressey expressed his disappointment, writing that the problems of invention are relatively simple but that one person alone can accomplish little. He regretfully dropped the work, hoping others would develop the field. Skinner attributes the failure of Pressey’s machines to two factors: cultural inertia and the limitations of the machines themselves. Pressey worked against a psychological theory that had not come to grips with the learning process. His machines, as versions of the memory drum, were primarily testing devices, used after learning had taken place elsewhere. Nevertheless, Skinner gives Pressey full credit for first emphasizing immediate feedback in education and for conceiving a machine that permitted the student an active role and an individual pace.
Having established the historical background, Skinner introduces “Another Kind of Machine,” one based on the modern understanding of the learning process. This understanding comes largely from studying lower organisms, but Skinner asserts that the results hold for human subjects. The emphasis of this research has been on discovering and controlling the variables of which learning is a function. By arranging contingencies of reinforcement, specific behaviors can be set up and brought under the control of specific stimuli, and maintained in strength for long periods. This technology has already been used in fields as diverse as neurology, pharmacology, nutrition, psychophysics, and psychiatry. A student is taught, Skinner argues, not merely by being shown what to do, but by being induced to engage in new forms of behavior upon specific occasions. The problem is not simply teaching content; it is ensuring that appropriate behavior appears at the proper time, an issue traditionally classed under motivation. In education, the behavior to be shaped is usually verbal, controlled by both verbal and nonverbal stimuli.
From this analysis, Skinner derives the requirements for an appropriate teaching machine. First, the student must compose his response rather than select it from a set of alternatives. This is because we want the student to recall rather than recognize, and because effective multiple-choice material must contain plausible wrong responses, which strengthen unwanted forms of behavior. Second, in acquiring complex behavior, the student must pass through a carefully designed sequence of small steps. Each step must be always takable, yet each must move the student closer to competent behavior, and the steps must be taken in a prescribed order. Skinner then describes several machines that have been built to meet these requirements. Sets of “frames” are stored on disks, cards, or tapes, with one frame presented at a time. In one type of machine, designed for lower grades, the student composes a response by moving printed figures or letters, and the machine compares his setting with a coded response. If they correspond, the next frame is presented; if not, the response is cleared and the student tries again. This machine has been tested in teaching spelling, arithmetic, and other subjects. For advanced students, such a machine is unnecessarily rigid; these students can compare their own written responses with printed material revealed by the machine. In the machine Skinner illustrates, material is printed in thirty radial frames on a twelve-inch disk. The student writes his response on a paper strip, then lifts a lever to move his writing under a transparent cover and uncover the correct response. If the responses correspond, he moves the lever horizontally, punching a hole that alters the machine so that the frame will not appear again. A second frame appears when the lever returns. The student works around the disk repeatedly, seeing only those frames he has not yet answered correctly.
Skinner is careful to clarify what the machine does and does not do. The machine itself does not teach; it brings the student into contact with the person who composed the material. It is a labor-saving device that brings one programmer into contact with many students, and its effect is like that of a private tutor. Skinner enumerates the machine’s tutorial qualities: there is a constant interchange between the student and the material; the machine induces sustained activity; it insists that a point be thoroughly understood before the student moves on; and it presents just that material for which the student is ready.
The article then moves into a detailed discussion of programming, beginning with arithmetic. Skinner discusses the teaching of multiplication tables, using the example of 9×7=63. The student is expected to arrive at this answer not by rote memorization, as with poetry, but by applying principles. He might use the rule that nine times a number equals ten times the number minus the number; or that the digits in a multiple of nine add up to nine; or that successive multiples of nine are composed by counting backwards (nine, eighteen, twenty-seven, thirty-six); or that nine times a single digit yields a number beginning with one less than the digit; or that the product of two numbers separated by one number equals the square of the separating number minus one. The program builds these principles gradually, so that the student discovers the answer through understanding rather than memorization.
Skinner acknowledges that such programs run to great length. At five or six frames per word, four grades of spelling might require 20,000 to 25,000 frames, and three or four grades of arithmetic require as many again. A teacher cannot supervise the 10,000 to 15,000 responses per pupil per year that such a program would require, but the pupil’s time is not so limited. Fifteen minutes per day on a machine suffices for each program, leaving the machines free for other students for the rest of the day. Skinner suggests that the inefficiency of traditional methods has led to the mistaken belief that education requires a prodigious part of a young person’s day.
Skinner then introduces a technique he calls “vanishing,” used to teach poetry at the high-school or college level. To teach the recitation of a poem, the first line is presented with several unimportant letters omitted. The student reads the line “meaningfully” and supplies the missing letters. Frames two, three, and four present succeeding lines in the same way. In the fifth frame, the first line reappears with more letters missing. Subsequent frames are increasingly incomplete, until after twenty to twenty-four frames the student can reproduce all four lines without external help, possibly without ever making a wrong response. This resembles spelling instruction: responses are first controlled by a text, which is slowly reduced or “vanished” until the responses are emitted without a text, under the “intraverbal” control of other members of the poem.
Vanishing can also be used to teach verbal behavior controlled by nonverbal stimuli, such as describing geography, anatomy, or naming plants and animals from specimens. The student first reports features of a fully labeled map, picture, or object; then the labels are vanished. For a map, the machine asks for spatial relations among cities, countries, and rivers on a fully labeled map, then on a map with incomplete or missing names, and finally with no map at all. Well-programmed material makes correct responses possible at every stage. Instruction may also aim at accurate description in any available terms, and the machine can ensure that the student “understands” a graph, diagram, chart, or picture by asking him to identify and explain its features, correcting his errors as he goes.
The machine can also give the student access to auditory material. For dictation in a foreign language, the student selects a short passage on an indexing phonograph, following the machine’s instructions. He listens to the passage as often as needed, transcribes it, and then the machine reveals the correct text. The student can listen again to find the sources of his errors. The indexing phonograph can also be used to teach other language skills, telegraphic code, music, speech, and literary and dramatic appreciation.
To illustrate the programming techniques in practice, Skinner presents a typical program from a high-school physics course. The frames are designed to induce a student to talk intelligently and technically about the emission of light from an incandescent source. The student writes a word or phrase to complete an item, then uncovers the answer in the right-hand column. Skinner instructs the reader to cover the answer column and uncover each line only after completing the item. He then analyzes the program’s construction in detail. Technical terms are introduced slowly. “Fine wire” is followed by a definition of “filament,” and then “filament” is asked for, first with a synonym and then without. Common words like “glow,” “give off light,” and “send out light” precede a definition of “emit.” Inflected forms follow, and “emit” is asked for with a synonym, then without a synonym but in a helpful phrase, and finally “emitted” and “emission” are asked for without help. The relationship between temperature, amount of light, and color is developed before the word “temperature” is asked for. “Incandescent” is defined, used, and then asked for, with a thematic prompt from the phrase “Incandescent source of light” and a formal prompt from the word “candle.” The word “energy” is evoked by the phrase “form of ….” which was used earlier in the frame, appears in the next two frames, and is finally asked for without aid. The program also reviews material, with the figure 800 appearing in three frames, with two intervening frames before the student is asked to recall it.
Skinner also describes special techniques for eliminating unwanted responses. In one frame, without the word “powerful,” two instances of “very” would lead the student to respond “strong”; inserting “powerful” makes a synonym redundant and prevents the error. In another frame, the phrase “heat and” preempts the response “heat,” forcing the student to supply a different word.
The net effect of such material, Skinner argues, exceeds the mere acquisition of facts. Beginning with an unverbalized acquaintance with flashlights and candles, the student comes to talk about familiar events with a technical vocabulary, applying new terms to newly seen similarities. The emission of light from an incandescent source becomes a topic or field of inquiry. Understanding emerges surprisingly, despite the fragmentation of the material into small steps.
Skinner acknowledges that constructing machine material is difficult. The material must be self-contained and wholly adequate, unlike textbook passages that can be clarified by a teacher. He notes that textbooks, lecture outlines, and film scripts are often inadequate by design, relying on the teacher to fill in the gaps.
The article then turns to a critique of traditional educational practices. Skinner attacks the deliberate use of difficult material, noting that teachers often avoid asking questions to which students know the answer, discard test items that everyone answers correctly, and include very difficult problems. A teacher who becomes a programmer may hesitate to allow an item that “gives the point away,” but Skinner argues that if motivation is solved by other means, giving a point away is highly effective. Making sure a student knows he doesn’t know is a motivational technique, not a learning process. Machines solve the motivation problem differently. Skinner also addresses the concern that easily learned material is more readily forgotten, asserting that there is no evidence for this and that retention can be ensured by subsequent painless review material.
The standard defense of “hard” material is that it teaches students to “think” and challenges them. Skinner dismisses this argument as often a rationalization for confusing presentation. Those who learn under difficult conditions are indeed better students, but the question is whether they are better because they surmounted the difficulties or whether they surmounted them because they were already better. In the guise of teaching thinking, Skinner charges, we set difficult situations and then claim credit for the students who succeed despite our efforts. The trouble with deliberately making education difficult is twofold. First, we must remain content with the students thus selected, even though they are only a small part of the potential supply of thinkers. Second, we sacrifice subject-matter teaching by renouncing effective but “easier” methods. A more sensible program, Skinner argues, is to analyze the behavior called “thinking” and produce it to specifications, using material from logic, mathematics, scientific method, and psychology.
The machine, Skinner reports, has already yielded relevant by-products in this area. Immediate feedback encourages more careful reading than studying a text, where the consequences of attention are deferred. Observing or attending to detail is shaped by the machine’s contingencies. With immediate results at stake, the student learns to marshal relevant material, concentrate on specific features, reject irrelevant material, refuse easy but wrong solutions, and tolerate indecision—all behaviors involved in effective thinking.
Skinner addresses the objection that easy material will make the student dependent on the machine and less able to cope with the inefficient presentations of lectures, textbooks, films, and “real life.” He responds that all good teachers must “wean” their students, and that the better the teacher, the more explicit the weaning. The final stages of a program must be designed so that the student no longer requires the machine’s arranged help, for example, by using the machine to discuss material that was studied in other forms. These questions, he admits, require further research.
Skinner then reports on the first large-scale evaluation of machine teaching. He notes that no such evaluation had been attempted before. His own work had been concerned with practical design problems and testing sample programs. The machine he illustrates was built with a grant from the Fund for the Advancement of Education. Material was prepared with the assistance of Lloyd E. Homme, Susan R. Meyer, and James G. Holland. A self-instruction room was set up under this grant, containing ten machines, and it was used to teach part of a human behavior course to Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates. Nearly two hundred students completed forty-eight disks, containing about 1,400 frames, which had been prepared with Holland. The material covered the factual core of the course, corresponding to about two hundred pages of the text. The median time spent was 141.5 hours. Students were not examined on the machine material but were held responsible for the overlapping text. Their reactions were studied through interviews and questionnaires, and the machines and material were being modified based on this feedback.
The expected advantages of the machines were generously confirmed, and unsuspected possibilities emerged. Most students felt they gained a great deal from the machine work. They reported that they could work for an hour or more with little effort, that they felt tired afterwards, and that they learned more in less time with less effort. Students remained interested in the material, although they noted that no relevance to crucial issues was pointed out; Skinner mentions that one change was intended to reduce the motivational level, which had become almost too high. An important advantage was that the student always knew where he stood, without having to wait for tests.
Skinner then addresses common questions about his approach. Can the findings of laboratory learning research be used without machines? Yes, he says, by improving textbooks and films, and teachers who understand the conditions of learning will be more effective. But a device is necessary to arrange the subtle contingencies of reinforcement that require individual attention. In nonverbal skills this is obvious; texts cannot arrange the final contingencies. Verbal skills depend on social reinforcement, but the machine mediates an essentially verbal relation, and we are not committed to the contingencies of immediate personal contact.
Skinner dismisses workbooks or self-scoring forms as unacceptable alternatives. When material is programmed, adjacent steps are so similar that one frame reveals the response to another; only mechanical presentation makes successive frames independent. An automatic record of student behavior is also desirable. Simplified versions of the machine have been useful, and Skinner cites the work of Ferster and Sapon, Porter, and Gilbert, but he argues that a machine with greater capabilities is warranted.
Will machines replace teachers? On the contrary, Skinner insists, they are capital equipment that will save the teacher’s time and labor. The teacher emerges as an indispensable human being, teaching more students in fewer hours. In return for this increased productivity, the teacher can ask society to improve his economic condition. Students may remain grouped in grades or classes, but each can proceed at his own level. A grade will show how far a student has gone: a C might mean that the student is halfway through a course. Given enough time, a student can get an A, which is no longer a motivating device but a record of achievement. The quick student will pick up A’s in other subjects.
Skinner considers the problem of individual differences. A program designed for the slowest student will probably not delay the fast student, who may fill in gaps in his knowledge. If necessary, programs can be built at two or more levels. If there are differences in “types of thinking,” extra time may present a subject in ways appropriate to many types. Individual differences that arise from missing an essential sequence—for example, a student who has no “mathematical ability” because he had measles when fractions were taught—will be eliminated.
Skinner lists other uses for the machines: home study, industrial and military training where group scheduling is inconvenient, and subjects that lack teachers, such as new equipment or sweeping method changes. Education fails, he notes, when handicaps make normal teacher relationships difficult—blind children treated as feeble-minded, deaf-mutes, spastics. A machine can be adapted to Braille and has infinite patience.
Main Arguments
The central argument of “Teaching Machines” is that education must be reorganized as a science of behavior, and that this reorganization requires mechanical devices to arrange the contingencies of reinforcement that make learning efficient. Skinner’s argument proceeds on several fronts. First, he establishes that the demand for education cannot be met by simply scaling up traditional methods. The answer is not more teachers but more productive teachers, and productivity requires capital equipment. Second, he argues that the audio-visual aids of his day are inadequate because they only present material; they do not shape behavior. True teaching requires an interchange between the student and the material, an interchange that can only be provided by a device that responds immediately to the student’s actions.
Third, Skinner argues that the student must be an active composer of responses, not a passive selector among alternatives. Recognition is not recall, and multiple-choice testing strengthens unwanted forms of behavior. The student must construct his answer and be immediately reinforced for correct construction. Fourth, the path to complex behavior must be broken into a carefully designed sequence of small steps, each of which the student can take successfully. This is the principle of programming, and it is the heart of the teaching machine’s power.
Fifth, Skinner argues that the deliberate difficulty of traditional education is a mistake. It selects for already-able students rather than creating ability, and it sacrifices effective teaching for the sake of a false ideal of “challenge.” The machine, by contrast, makes learning easy and pleasant, and there is no evidence that easily learned material is more readily forgotten. Sixth, Skinner argues that the machine does not dehumanize education but rather frees the teacher to be more human. The teacher is not replaced but is elevated to the role of a true educator, while the machine handles the routine but crucial work of shaping basic skills.
Key Concepts
The article introduces or popularizes several key concepts that would become central to the field of programmed instruction. The most fundamental is the “contingency of reinforcement,” the arrangement by which a specific behavior is followed by a specific consequence, and it is this contingency that shapes and maintains behavior. Skinner argues that the teacher’s task is to arrange these contingencies so that the student is induced to engage in new forms of behavior. The “frame” is the basic unit of programmed material, a single step in the sequence of instruction. Frames are designed so that the student can almost always answer correctly, and they gradually build toward complex behavior.
“Vanishing” is a specific programming technique in which a stimulus that controls a response is gradually withdrawn. The student first responds with the full text or label present, and then the text is slowly reduced until the response is emitted without any external support. This technique is used to teach poetry, spelling, and the description of nonverbal stimuli. Skinner also emphasizes the distinction between “recall” and “recognition,” arguing that the student must be able to produce a response, not merely identify it. The machine is designed to require recall.
Another key concept is the “self-instruction room,” a classroom equipped with multiple machines that allows each student to work at his own pace. The machine itself is described as a “labor-saving device” that brings one programmer into contact with many students, functioning like a “private tutor.” Skinner also introduces the idea of “weaning,” the process by which the student is gradually freed from dependence on the machine’s support, so that he can cope with the less efficient presentations of lectures, textbooks, and real life. Finally, the article is built on the premise that the experimental analysis of behavior, derived from the study of lower organisms, can be applied directly to human education.
Themes
A dominant theme is the application of a scientific, experimental approach to education. Skinner repeatedly contrasts the modern science of learning, which emphasizes the discovery and control of variables, with the older psychology of the memory drum, which merely observed the rate of forgetting. He argues that education must become a technology, based on the same principles of reinforcement that have proved effective in the laboratory. This theme is closely tied to a critique of traditional educational practices, which Skinner sees as inefficient, punitive, and based on a misunderstanding of how learning actually occurs. The traditional emphasis on difficulty, on challenging the student, is exposed as a rationalization for poor design.
Another theme is the redefinition of the teacher’s role. Skinner is at pains to argue that the machine does not replace the teacher but rather frees the teacher from drudgery. The teacher becomes a “programmer,” composing the material that the machine delivers, and an “indispensable human being” who can attend to the higher-order needs of students. The machine handles the routine, mechanical aspects of instruction, allowing the teacher to focus on what only a human can do. This is a vision of augmented human capability, not automation for its own sake.
The theme of individual differences runs throughout the article. Skinner argues that the machine allows each student to proceed at his own rate, eliminating the frustration of the slow student and the boredom of the fast one. He suggests that many apparent differences in ability are actually the result of gaps in a student’s sequence of learning—gaps that could be filled by a well-designed program. The machine is also presented as a solution for students with handicaps, such as blindness or deafness, who cannot easily interact with a human teacher.
A further theme is the motivational power of immediate feedback. Skinner argues that the machine’s constant interchange with the student, its insistence on mastery before proceeding, and its immediate confirmation of correct answers create a level of engagement that traditional methods cannot match. Students in the Harvard trial reported working for long periods with little effort and feeling tired afterwards, evidence of the machine’s ability to induce sustained activity. The machine makes the consequences of attention immediate, and this shapes the student’s behavior in powerful ways.
The Author’s Conclusions
Skinner concludes that an analysis of education within a science of behavior has broad implications for the future of schooling. He sees the teaching machine not as a gadget but as the natural outcome of a proper understanding of the learning process. The machine is a labor-saving device that amplifies the reach of a single skilled teacher, bringing well-programmed material to many students with the effect of a private tutor. He is confident that the approach works, citing the successful trial at Harvard, and he is optimistic about its future applications in home study, industrial and military training, and the education of students with disabilities.
He concludes by noting that schools, especially “progressive” ones, are often blamed for social problems such as juvenile delinquency and for falling behind foreign technology. His implicit argument is that a science of behavior, applied through teaching machines, offers a way to make education genuinely effective, addressing these criticisms at their root. The machine is not a replacement for the teacher but a tool that makes the teacher more effective, and it offers a path toward an education that is efficient, engaging, and tailored to the individual student. The article ends on a note of advocacy for a technological transformation of education, grounded in the certainties of behavioral science.
Significance
“Teaching Machines” is a landmark document in the history of educational technology. It marks the moment when the behaviorist tradition in psychology, which had largely been confined to the laboratory, was systematically applied to the design of instructional materials and devices. The article introduced concepts—programmed instruction, frames, vanishing, immediate reinforcement—that would go on to shape the field of educational technology for decades. Skinner’s work directly influenced the development of teaching machines and programmed textbooks in the 1960s, and its principles can be seen in later developments such as computer-assisted instruction, personalized learning systems, and even modern educational software that adapts to the individual learner’s pace and performance.
The article is also significant for its forceful articulation of a particular philosophy of education: that learning is a behavioral process that can be engineered, that the student should be an active participant in his own instruction, and that the teacher’s role is to design effective contingencies of reinforcement rather than simply to present information. This philosophy was controversial in its time, and it remains so, but it has had a lasting influence on how educators think about the design of instruction. The article’s critique of traditional education—its reliance on difficulty, its inefficiency, its failure to accommodate individual differences—anticipated many of the reform movements of the later twentieth century. “Teaching Machines” stands as a bold and influential statement of the belief that education can be improved through the systematic application of science, and it remains essential reading for anyone interested in the history and theory of educational technology.
