Lindsley, Ogden R.

Ogden R. Lindsley (1922–2004) was a pioneer in the area of behavioral psychology. He was the first individual to employ behavioral principles in the treatment of human subjects. His work directly affected the field of education through establishing the foundations of applied behavior analysis and behavioral interventions with individuals who possess disabilities.

Lindsley studied under B. F. Skinner at Harvard and received his PhD in psychology in 1957. During his time as director of the Behavioral Research Center of Harvard University, he applied the principles of behaviorism in the treatment of persons with mental retardation, emotional disorders, and developmental disabilities. The center was the first human operant laboratory, and Lindsley coined the term behavior therapy during this period.

Lindsley joined the growing number of behaviorally oriented faculty at the University of Kansas in 1965, where he served as a research associate in the Bureau of Child Research and as the director of Educational Research. While initially interested in special education, Lindsley eventually joined the Department of Administration, Foundations, and Higher Education to work with school administrators. It was his feeling that educational leaders had the greatest influence in reforming and restructuring the education system and that behavioral principles offered one of the most effective means of ensuring school improvement.

While much of his work involved curriculum and curriculum development, his work with direct instruction, precision teaching (a method he devised and developed), and the personalized system of instruction had a positive and ongoing influence on schools and schooling. Curriculum-based assessments were a direct outgrowth of Lindsley's work in the area of instruction and measurement. Lindsley often warned teachers of the danger in using high-takes consequences to enhance student performance and compliance (a technique with which he was familiar from his time as a POW during World War II) with a dull, irrelevant curriculum. For Lindsley, teacher-controlled consequences were the basis of initiating and maintaining student response. The pairing of these consequences with those that naturally occurred in the school setting would lead to high rates of academic response and low rates of problem behaviors. Eventually, the artificial, teacher-constructed consequences could be faded out and those inherent in positive learning activities and a relevant curriculum would control and maintain student behavior.

Lindsley was an outspoken critic of the public education system. He felt that much of the failure of the schools was due to their abandonment of effective, empirically validated instruction and assessment methods. His work is important for educational leaders because of his emphasis on consistent, regular measurement of student learning and the application [Page 617]of effective, research-validated practices as the foundation of school improvement.