boundary 2

Tag: secondary education

  • The Automatic Teacher

    The Automatic Teacher

    By Audrey Watters
    ~

    “For a number of years the writer has had it in mind that a simple machine for automatic testing of intelligence or information was entirely within the realm of possibility. The modern objective test, with its definite systemization of procedure and objectivity of scoring, naturally suggests such a development. Further, even with the modern objective test the burden of scoring (with the present very extensive use of such tests) is nevertheless great enough to make insistent the need for labor-saving devices in such work” – Sidney Pressey, “A Simple Apparatus Which Gives Tests and Scores – And Teaches,” School and Society, 1926

    Ohio State University professor Sidney Pressey first displayed the prototype of his “automatic intelligence testing machine” at the 1924 American Psychological Association meeting. Two years later, he submitted a patent for the device and spent the next decade or so trying to market it (to manufacturers and investors, as well as to schools).

    It wasn’t Pressey’s first commercial move. In 1922 he and his wife Luella Cole published Introduction to the Use of Standard Tests, a “practical” and “non-technical” guide meant “as an introductory handbook in the use of tests” aimed to meet the needs of “the busy teacher, principal or superintendent.” By the mid–1920s, the two had over a dozen different proprietary standardized tests on the market, selling a couple of hundred thousand copies a year, along with some two million test blanks.

    Although standardized testing had become commonplace in the classroom by the 1920s, they were already placing a significant burden upon those teachers and clerks tasked with scoring them. Hoping to capitalize yet again on the test-taking industry, Pressey argued that automation could “free the teacher from much of the present-day drudgery of paper-grading drill, and information-fixing – should free her for real teaching of the inspirational.”

    pressey_machines

    The Automatic Teacher

    Here’s how Pressey described the machine, which he branded as the Automatic Teacher in his 1926 School and Society article:

    The apparatus is about the size of an ordinary portable typewriter – though much simpler. …The person who is using the machine finds presented to him in a little window a typewritten or mimeographed question of the ordinary selective-answer type – for instance:

    To help the poor debtors of England, James Oglethorpe founded the colony of (1) Connecticut, (2) Delaware, (3) Maryland, (4) Georgia.

    To one side of the apparatus are four keys. Suppose now that the person taking the test considers Answer 4 to be the correct answer. He then presses Key 4 and so indicates his reply to the question. The pressing of the key operates to turn up a new question, to which the subject responds in the same fashion. The apparatus counts the number of his correct responses on a little counter to the back of the machine…. All the person taking the test has to do, then, is to read each question as it appears and press a key to indicate his answer. And the labor of the person giving and scoring the test is confined simply to slipping the test sheet into the device at the beginning (this is done exactly as one slips a sheet of paper into a typewriter), and noting on the counter the total score, after the subject has finished.

    The above paragraph describes the operation of the apparatus if it is being used simply to test. If it is to be used also to teach then a little lever to the back is raised. This automatically shifts the mechanism so that a new question is not rolled up until the correct answer to the question to which the subject is responding is found. However, the counter counts all tries.

    It should be emphasized that, for most purposes, this second set is by all odds the most valuable and interesting. With this second set the device is exceptionally valuable for testing, since it is possible for the subject to make more than one mistake on a question – a feature which is, so far as the writer knows, entirely unique and which appears decidedly to increase the significance of the score. However, in the way in which it functions at the same time as an ‘automatic teacher’ the device is still more unusual. It tells the subject at once when he makes a mistake (there is no waiting several days, until a corrected paper is returned, before he knows where he is right and where wrong). It keeps each question on which he makes an error before him until he finds the right answer; he must get the correct answer to each question before he can go on to the next. When he does give the right answer, the apparatus informs him immediately to that effect. If he runs the material through the little machine again, it measures for him his progress in mastery of the topics dealt with. In short the apparatus provides in very interesting ways for efficient learning.

    A video from 1964 shows Pressey demonstrating his “teaching machine,” including the “reward dial” feature that could be set to dispense a candy once a certain number of correct answers were given:

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7OfEXWuulg?rel=0]

    Market Failure

    UBC’s Stephen Petrina documents the commercial failure of the Automatic Teacher in his 2004 article “Sidney Pressey and the Automation of Education, 1924–1934.” According to Petrina, Pressey started looking for investors for his machine in December 1925, “first among publishers and manufacturers of typewriters, adding machines, and mimeo- graph machines, and later, in the spring of 1926, extending his search to scientific instrument makers.” He approached at least six Midwestern manufacturers in 1926, but no one was interested.

    In 1929, Pressey finally signed a contract with the W. M. Welch Manufacturing Company, a Chicago-based company that produced scientific instruments.

    Petrina writes that,

    After so many disappointments, Pressey was impatient: he offered to forgo royalties on two hundred machines if Welch could keep the price per copy at five dollars, and he himself submitted an order for thirty machines to be used in a summer course he taught school administrators. A few months later he offered to put up twelve hundred dollars to cover tooling costs. Medard W. Welch, sales manager of Welch Manufacturing, however, advised a “slower, more conservative approach.” Fifteen dollars per machine was a more realistic price, he thought, and he offered to refund Pressey fifteen dollars per machine sold until Pressey recouped his twelve-hundred-dollar investment. Drawing on nearly fifty years experience selling to schools, Welch was reluctant to rush into any project that depended on classroom reforms. He preferred to send out circulars advertising the Automatic Teacher, solicit orders, and then proceed with production if a demand materialized.

    ad_pressey

    The demand never really materialized, and even if it had, the manufacturing process – getting the device to market – was plagued with problems, caused in part by Pressey’s constant demands to redefine and retool the machines.

    The stress from the development of the Automatic Teacher took an enormous toll on Pressey’s health, and he had a breakdown in late 1929. (He was still teaching, supervising courses, and advising graduate students at Ohio State University.)

    The devices did finally ship in April 1930. But that original sales price was cost-prohibitive. $15 was, as Petrina notes, “more than half the annual cost ($29.27) of educating a student in the United States in 1930.” Welch could not sell the machines and ceased production with 69 of the original run of 250 devices still in stock.

    Pressey admitted defeat. In a 1932 School and Society article, he wrote “The writer is regretfully dropping further work on these problems. But he hopes that enough has been done to stimulate other workers.”

    But Pressey didn’t really abandon the teaching machine. He continued to present on his research at APA meetings. But he did write in a 1964 article “Teaching Machines (And Learning Theory) Crisis” that “Much seems very wrong about current attempts at auto-instruction.”

    Indeed.

    Automation and Individualization

    In his article “Toward the Coming ‘Industrial Revolution’ in Education (1932), Pressey wrote that

    “Education is the one major activity in this country which is still in a crude handicraft stage. But the economic depression may here work beneficially, in that it may force the consideration of efficiency and the need for laborsaving devices in education. Education is a large-scale industry; it should use quantity production methods. This does not mean, in any unfortunate sense, the mechanization of education. It does mean freeing the teacher from the drudgeries of her work so that she may do more real teaching, giving the pupil more adequate guidance in his learning. There may well be an ‘industrial revolution’ in education. The ultimate results should be highly beneficial. Perhaps only by such means can universal education be made effective.”

    Pressey intended for his automated teaching and testing machines to individualize education. It’s an argument that’s made about teaching machines today too. These devices will allow students to move at their own pace through the curriculum. They will free up teachers’ time to work more closely with individual students.

    But as Pretina argues, “the effect of automation was control and standardization.”

    The Automatic Teacher was a technology of normalization, but it was at the same time a product of liberality. The Automatic Teacher provided for self- instruction and self-regulated, therapeutic treatment. It was designed to provide the right kind and amount of treatment for individual, scholastic deficiencies; thus, it was individualizing. Pressey articulated this liberal rationale during the 1920s and 1930s, and again in the 1950s and 1960s. Although intended as an act of freedom, the self-instruction provided by an Automatic Teacher also habituated learners to the authoritative norms underwriting self-regulation and self-governance. They not only learned to think in and about school subjects (arithmetic, geography, history), but also how to discipline themselves within this imposed structure. They were regulated not only through the knowledge and power embedded in the school subjects but also through the self-governance of their moral conduct. Both knowledge and personality were normalized in the minutiae of individualization and in the machinations of mass education. Freedom from the confines of mass education proved to be a contradictory project and, if Pressey’s case is representative, one more easily automated than commercialized.

    The massive influx of venture capital into today’s teaching machines, of course, would like to see otherwise…
    _____

    Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology – the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. Her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED’s education technology blog MindShift, in the data section of O’Reilly Radar, on Inside Higher Ed, in The School Library Journal, in The Atlantic, on ReadWriteWeb, and Edutopia. She is the author of the recent book The Monsters of Education Technology (Smashwords, 2014) and working on a book called Teaching Machines. She maintains the widely-read Hack Education blog, on which an earlier version of this review first appeared.

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  • Teacher Wars and Teaching Machines

    Teacher Wars and Teaching Machines

    teacher warsa review of Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (Doubleday, 2014)
    by Audrey Watters
    ~

    Teaching is, according to the subtitle of education journalist Dana Goldstein’s new book, “America’s Most Embattled Profession.” “No other profession,” she argues, ”operates under this level of political scrutiny, not even those, like policing or social work, that are also tasked with public welfare and are paid for with public funds.”

    That political scrutiny is not new. Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars chronicles the history of teaching at (what has become) the K–12 level, from the early nineteenth century and “common schools” — that is, before before compulsory education and public school as we know it today — through the latest Obama Administration education policies. It’s an incredibly well-researched book that moves from the feminization of the teaching profession to the recent push for more data-driven teacher evaluation, observing how all along the way, teachers have been deemed ineffectual in some way or another — failing to fulfill whatever (political) goals the public education system has demanded be met, be those goals be economic, civic, or academic.

    As Goldstein describes it, public education is a labor issue; and it has been, it’s important to note, since well before the advent of teacher unions.

    The Teacher Wars and Teaching Machines

    To frame education this way — around teachers and by extension, around labor — has important implications for ed-tech. What happens if we examine the history of teaching alongside the history of teaching machines? As I’ve argued before, the history of public education in the US, particularly in the 20th century, is deeply intertwined with various education technologies – film, TV, radio, computers, the Internet – devices that are often promoted as improving access or as making an outmoded system more “modern.” But ed-tech is frequently touted too as “labor-saving” and as a corrective to teachers’ inadequacies and inefficiencies.

    It’s hardly surprising, in this light, that teachers have long looked with suspicion at new education technologies. With their profession constantly under attack, many teacher are worried no doubt that new tools are poised to replace them. Much is said to quiet these fears, with education reformers and technologists insisting again and again that replacing teachers with tech is not the intention.

    And yet the sentiment of science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke probably does resonate with a lot of people, as a line from his 1980 Omni Magazine article on computer-assisted instruction is echoed by all sorts of pundits and politicians: “Any teacher who can be replaced by a machine should be.”

    Of course, you do find people like former Washington DC mayor Adrian Fenty – best known arguably via his school chancellor Michelle Rhee – who’ll come right out and say to a crowd of entrepreneurs and investors, “If we fire more teachers, we can use that money for more technology.”

    So it’s hard to ignore the role that technology increasingly plays in contemporary education (labor) policies – as Goldstein describes them, the weakening of teachers’ tenure protections alongside an expansion of standardized testing to measure “student learning,” all in the service finding and firing “bad teachers.” The growing data collection and analysis enabled by schools’ adoption of ed-tech feeds into the politics and practices of employee surveillance.

    Just as Goldstein discovered in the course of writing her book that the current “teacher wars” have a lengthy history, so too does ed-tech’s role in the fight.

    As Sidney Pressey, the man often credited with developing the first teaching machine, wrote in 1933 (from a period Goldstein links to “patriotic moral panics” and concerns about teachers’ political leanings),

    There must be an “industrial revolution” in education, in which educational science and the ingenuity of educational technology combine to modernize the grossly inefficient and clumsy procedures of conventional education. Work in the schools of the school will be marvelously though simply organized, so as to adjust almost automatically to individual differences and the characteristics of the learning process. There will be many labor-saving schemes and devices, and even machines — not at all for the mechanizing of education but for the freeing of teacher and pupil from the educational drudgery and incompetence.

    Or as B. F. Skinner, the man most associated with the development of teaching machines, wrote in 1953 (one year before the landmark Brown v Board of Education),

    Will machines replace teachers? On the contrary, they are capital equipment to be used by teachers to save time and labor. In assigning certain mechanizable functions to machines, the teacher emerges in his proper role as an indispensable human being. He may teach more students than heretofore — this is probably inevitable if the world-wide demand for education is to be satisfied — but he will do so in fewer hours and with fewer burdensome chores.

    These quotations highlight the longstanding hopes and fears about teaching labor and teaching machines; they hint too at some of the ways in which the work of Pressey and Skinner and others coincides with what Goldstein’s book describes: the ongoing concerns about teachers’ politics and competencies.

    The Drudgery of School

    One of the things that’s striking about Skinner and Pressey’s remarks on teaching machines, I think, is that they recognize the “drudgery” of much of teachers’ work. But rather than fundamentally change school – rather than ask why so much of the job of teaching entails “burdensome chores” – education technology seems more likely to offload that drudgery to machines. (One of the best contemporary examples of this perhaps: automated essay grading.)

    This has powerful implications for students, who – let’s be honest – suffer through this drudgery as well.

    Goldstein’s book doesn’t really address students’ experiences. Her history of public education is focused on teacher labor more than on student learning. As a result, student labor is missing from her analysis. This isn’t a criticism of the book; and it’s not just Goldstein that does this. Student labor in the history of public education remains largely under-theorized and certainly underrepresented. Cue AFT president Al Shanker’s famous statement: “Listen, I don’t represent children. I represent the teachers.”

    But this question of student labor seems to be incredibly important to consider, particularly with the growing adoption of education technologies. Students’ labor – students’ test results, students’ content, students’ data – feeds the measurements used to reward or punish teachers. Students’ labor feeds the algorithms – algorithms that further this larger narrative about teacher inadequacies, sure, and that serve to financially benefit technology, testing, and textbook companies, the makers of today’s “teaching machines.”

    Teaching Machines and the Future of Collective Action

    The promise of teaching machines has long been to allow students to move “at their own pace” through the curriculum. “Personalized learning,” it’s often called today (although the phrase often refers only to “personalization” in terms of the pace, not in terms of the topics of inquiry). This means, supposedly, that instead of whole class instruction, the “work” of teaching changes: in the words of one education reformer, “with the software taking up chores like grading math quizzes and flagging bad grammar, teachers are freed to do what they do best: guide, engage, and inspire.”

    Again, it’s not clear how this changes the work of students.

    So what are the implications – not just pedagogically but politically – of students, their headphones on staring at their individual computer screens working alone through various exercises? Because let’s remember: teaching machines and all education technologies are ideological. What are the implications – not just pedagogically but politically – of these technologies’ emphasis on individualism, self-management, personal responsibility, and autonomy?

    What happens to discussion and debate, for example, in a classroom of teaching machines and “personalized learning”? What happens, in a world of schools catered to individual student achievement, to the community development that schools (at their best, at least) are also tasked to support?

    What happens to organizing? What happens to collective action? And by collectivity here, let’s be clear, I don’t mean simply “what happens to teachers’ unions”? If we think about The Teacher Wars and teaching machines side-by-side, we should recognize our analysis of (our actions surrounding) the labor issues of school need to go much deeper and more farther than that.

    _____

    Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology – the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. Her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED’s education technology blog MindShift, in the data section of O’Reilly Radar, on Inside Higher Ed, in The School Library Journal, in The Atlantic, on ReadWriteWeb, and Edutopia. She is the author of the recent book The Monsters of Education Technology (Smashwords, 2014) and working on a book called Teaching Machines. She maintains the widely-read Hack Education blog, on which an earlier version of this review first appeared.

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