Learner Variables and Educational Media

Educators long have sought ways to adapt group methods of instruction in such ways that all children in the group progress at acceptable rates and reach satisfactory levels of achievement in reasonable amounts of time. It is not surprising that group teaching methods with some fixed set of materials normally fail to achieve the purpose. In both research and classroom practice, the attempt to find ways to meet individual needs by group methods tends to encounter confusion of three important parts of the problem: (a) criteria-how fast and how well the learner progresses; (b) the learning variables-why the child progresses or does not progress; and (c) the choice among methods for attempting to adapt group teaching to individual needs-branching instruction, parallel sets of material, grouping by ability, or diagnostic testing and remedial instruction. If, somehow, attention could be focused first on the learning variableswhy the person does or does not meet the criteria of progress-then insights might be gained into what the individual learner needs by way of instructional materials or media. We could then consider how this need

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