Instruction as a Field of Study

History of the Field of Instruction

Toward the end of the 19th century, there emerged early influences that signaled a field of instruction. The eminent German psychologist, Johann Friedrich Herbart, was the first educational writer to put an emphasis on instruction as a process that focused on the pupil's experience. This focus required the teacher to attend to the child's previous knowledge and interest. With this psychology, the teacher was told to follow a systematic procedural guide known as the five formal steps of teaching and learning. The steps were articulated as follows: (1)   preparation, bringing the pupil's previous learning experiences to his or her attention; (2)    presentation, giving new information; (3)  association, showing the relationship between the new and the old information; (4) generalization, making up rules or general principles that express the meaning of the lesson; and (5) application, giving the general principles meaning by using them in a practical way or by deriving specific examples. Many Americans went to Germany to study Herbart's ideas during the final decades of the 19th century. The American Herbartians formed a club that became the National Herbart Society. In a few years, the National Herbart Society's name was changed to the National Society for the Scientific Study of Education. Their reform movement was relatively short lived; however, their influence helped to undermine the dominant theory related to classical mental discipline (e.g., faculty psychology). Herbartianism functioned as a transitional theory toward child centeredness, and later, the theory of faculty psychology fell victim to a triumphant experimental science of psychology.

The turn of the 20th century brought scientific promises in experimentation and measurement that shaped psychological thinkers such as G. Stanley Hall of Johns Hopkins University, Charles Rudd of the University of Chicago, and Edward Thorndike of Columbia University. Thorndike, for instance, claimed that if something exists, it exists in a given amount and as such, is capable of being measured. He reflected the belief that scientific knowledge of stimulus-response behavioral patterns would enable educators to alter human behavior. He described education as a form of human engineering that would profit by measurements of human nature and achievement. From the work of Thorndike and other experimental psychologists emerged the push for a science of instruction and the beginnings of instruction as a production system.

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