Teachers’ use of a verbally governed algorithm and student learning.

Abstract

The effects of instructing teachers in the use of a verbally governed algorithm to solve students’ learning problems were measured. The teachers were taught to analyze students’ responses to instruction using a strategic protocol, which included a series of verbally governed questions. The study was designed to determine whether the instructional method would affect the number of verbally governed decisions which the teachers made as well as the number of academic objectives achieved by the teachers’ students. A multiple baseline design across three teachers and six students was used to measure the effectiveness of the instructional procedures. The results indicated that the teachers’ students achieved significantly more learning objectives when they used a verbally governed algorithm to solve instructional problems. Applications to teaching of research findings from the basic and applied sciences of behavior require teachers that can function as strategic scientists. In other words, teachers need to analyze the learning problems of individual children and know when and how to apply relevant and tested tactics from the literature. This is the hallmark of differentiated instruction or therapy by evidence-based applied behavior analysis. The identification of effective tactics requires the location of the possible source of the problem as well as the selection of a tactic that is most likely to remediate the problem. Both of these steps require the teacher to complete a contingency analysis of the components of instruction (Greer, 2002; Greer, 2004; Greer, Keohane & Healy 2003; Greer & Keohane 2004;). The pursuit of solutions to particular learning problems involves many of the repertoires that Skinner (1957) characterized as the verbal behavior of scientists. The research that we report here consists of a functional analysis of the relation of these teacher repertoires to students’ learning as well as a basic conceptual analysis (Catania, 1998) of some of the verbal repertoires used by scientists. Hall & Broden (1968) characterized teachers as researchers early on in the applied literature. It

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