Precision Teaching in Perspective: An Interview with Ogden R. Lindsley

Is precision teaching different from or the same as behavior modification? • Precision teaching is a new technique in special education. Ogden R. Lindsley shaped and developed the idea in response to the needs of exceptional children as reported to him by the teachers of these special children. In this interview, conducted by Dr. Duncan, Dr. Lindsley described the origins of precision teaching, the difference between behavior modification and precision teaching, and the present and future implications of precision teaching for special and regular education. Ogden R. Lindsley is Professor of Education at the University of Kansas. He was associated with the Kansas Center for Mental Retardation and Human Development and is now at the School of Education, Lawrence, Kansas. o First, let me emphasize that precision teaching came about" because of children in special education classrooms. If it had not been for these students communicating their needs to their teachers and the teachers sharing ideas with us, we could not have developed precision teaching as beautifully and quickly as we did. In 1965, here at the University of Kansas, we decided to see if collecting daily frequency records of students' performance would be useful to classroom teachers. This idea of recording frequency of performance came from learning research. Dr. B. F. Skinner was the person who developed frequency to measure behavior. But Skinner's work was based on laboratory research, and we wanted to see if recording daily frequency would be of any help in monitoring instruction and evaluating curriculum and teaching in special and regular classes. So in 1965 we started having teachers record students' performances. Our first problem was that it was too much work for most teachers to record 2, 3, or 4 different daily frequencies on each child, especially if they had 12 to 30 students. Then about 1968 many of our creative teachers began to involve the students in recording. We found that this was the answer to our economic and time problems-having the students record their own behavior. Now our kindergarten and first grade children are recording and charting their daily classroom performances on Standard Behavior Charts. These records of performance are turning out to be very_useful in curriculum design, behavior change, and handling discipline problems. The thing they have in common is that the first people to use both originally were trained in the same academic discipline--operant conditioning. This was developed by Fred Skinner at Harvard and Fred Keller at Columbia and some of their associates and students. The thing that makes them different is that behavior modification stresses the change procedures that were originally used in laboratory operant conditioning.