Precision Teaching

Guiding Principles

Ogden Lindsley, who first introduced precision teaching in the 1960s, borrowed five major tenets from B. F. Skinner's experimental analysis of behavior.

• 1.
  The Learner Knows Best. When confronted with data suggesting that assumptions about the effects of experimental conditions were erroneous, Skinner often commented, “The rat [or pigeon] knows best” and modified the assumptions accordingly. Lindsley rephrased that sentiment to make it more inclusive—“The learner knows best”—firmly anchoring precision [Page 1434]teaching in an empirical, rather than a theoretical, tradition. Simply put, no matter how much we believe that an approach to instruction should work, if the learner does not learn, something must be changed.
• 2.

  Focus on Directly Observable Behavior. Precision teaching focuses on concrete, directly observable behaviors that are amenable to reliable and sensitive assessment and lend themselves to the timely coordination of instructional events. Such behaviors, called movement cycles, meet three criteria. First, they involve directly observable physical movement, such as reaching, touching, walking, writing, or speaking. Second, each instance of the behavior must involve a cycle with a definite beginning and end. For example, unless the beginning of “sharing toys” is clear, that behavior cannot be monitored reliably, and the instruction for that behavior cannot be coordinated in a timely and consistent fashion. Third, the behavior should be repeatable often. The more often a behavior occurs, the more sensitive behavior counts become to small performance changes, and the greater the number of opportunities for the instructional manager to provide guidance and feedback.

  Many behaviors of interest meet the criteria for a movement cycle without the need to redefine the assessment target (e.g., “takes steps while walking,” “initiates social interaction”). Many other behaviors of interest are essentially “private” but are easily made “public.” For example, “decoding printed words” is essentially a private behavior that can be completed without any directly observable action, but the student can easily be asked to engage in a correlated public behavior (e.g., “speaking decoded words aloud”) to serve as the measurement target. In cases where no commonly accepted public surrogate for a private behavior is available (e.g., “urges” to fight, as opposed to actual fighting behavior), precision teachers might monitor a student's reports of private events. As noted by Skinner, however, verbal reports do not always accurately reflect the behavior to which they refer. Where possible, we should attempt to cross-validate reports of private events with important public events, even if those public events occur too infrequently to monitor in daily progress. For example, the usefulness of reports concerning reductions in “urges to fight” could be cross-validated by monitoring actual fighting incidents.

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