In West’s historical look at education, he notes that the state jumped on a horse that was already galloping in terms of taking over private schools which were doing a good job. What West doesn’t mention is that this horse was immediately steered into a wall, which brings us to the metaphor of Dead Horse Racing, presented earlier.
West, E.G. (1994) Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy Third Edition, Revised and Expanded. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
What follows is from the book: Shadow Dancing on the Grave of Hope:
A complete explanation of the components of effective teaching is found in Johnson and Layng and will be expanded in future posts. I’ve talked about Direct Instruction and today will discuss fluency. There are three other components, Applied Behavior Analysis, Programmed Instruction and The Individualized System of Instruction. A interesting side note about this combination is that several people, myself included, I modestly add, came up with them more or less independently. This is not as difficult as it may appear since each of the components is effective on its own. This combination of methods is not used, officially, in any public school system because effectiveness and efficiency are not rewarded in public institutions.
Fluency: The Swiss Army Knife of Education
"Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them" Alfred North Whitehead in Introduction to Mathematics.
"What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence." Samuel Johnson.
The notion of the importance of fluency, resulting from practice, elegantly presented by many, has been supported by the research on expert performance which is rigorously ignored by education.
Fluency is a concept pioneered by Skinner, Lindsley and Haughton and comes from the study of the fundamental properties of behavior. Fluency, which is speed with accuracy along with a dash of smoothness, is the description of expert performance in areas as different as reading, bricklaying, basketball, computer programming and mathematics. Education has traditionally emphasized percent correct and disregarded the powerful variable of time, important in other sciences.
Binder, "The mere presence or accuracy of a response class in the repertoire of a learner is not sufficient to ensure progress through a curriculum sequence that depends on that response class as a prerequisite or component." Eric Haughton’s analogy was "…that, like atoms requiring a certain valence of energy to combine, behavioral elements require a certain frequency to form compound response classes." Binder 1996, p. 60.
Cumulative dysfluency means that many component skills are not learned to fluency. The longer the unfortunate student is in the educational system, the more influence dysfluencies will have on his performance.
My first student I taught using assumptions about fluency and basic skills was Pauline, an 22 year old "street" person who was functionally illiterate. Pauline tried hard, but when she wrote down telephone messages, for example, the results were impossible to decipher. It was no surprise when Pauline went to the local adult retraining center and tested at the Grade 2 level. Eric Haughton suggested that Pauline was lacking the most basic tool skills in math, reading and writing. We started her practicing basic math facts, writing the letters of the alphabet and reading simple passages, all in one-minute periods. Pauline improved in all her projects and became very enthusiastic about increasing her scores. After twenty days of practice, her telephone messages started to make sense and gradually became as readable as anyone’s. At the end of 3 months of 15 to 20 minutes a day practice, Pauline retook the entrance exam and scored at the Grade Eight level. I followed her first few months of successful upgrading in the community college. As Carl Binder says, "…in order to acquire and smoothly attain competence on a given composite skill or knowledge task, one must achieve both accuracy and speed on its components or prerequisites." 1993, p. 9. Component learning will have to improve far past 100 percent accuracy to allow smooth transition to more complex material. Students enjoy practice when they have an aim of "setting a new record" competing against themselves.
A fluent reader is fast and accurate. The words spoken follow the text and are read understandably at high speed. Words are not omitted, substituted or inserted. Fluent behavior is automatic. It can be performed well under conditions of distraction, fatigue and high levels of emotion. A high level of fluency will be retained over long periods without practice. Accuracy alone does not distinguish between good and poor students. Good students are faster. If new skills are taught before a certain level of fluency is reached, the new skills will not be readily acquired. Because a student has a reachable aim in each exercise, practice is much more pleasant as the student competes against his old score. As one student said, "If you don’t have an aim, you’re aimless. When skills are not taught to the level of fluency, they are taught to the level of dysfluency. When many skills are required for a task, and the student has not learned each to fluent level, the result will be frustration and inability to perform the task. In mathematics, for example, students who face a new task without mastering the sub-skills required, may as well be looking at a problem posed in Swahili with an answer required in Sanskrit.
Binder, C. (1993) Behavioral Fluency: A new paradigm. Educational Technology, 33, 8-14.
Binder, C. (1996) Behavioral Fluency: Evolution of a New Paradigm. The Behavior Analyst, 19(2), 163-197.
Cheerio and ttfn,
Grant Coulson
