Is Fluency Free-Operant Response-Response Chaining?

The Behavior Analyst 1996, 19, 21 1-224 No. 2 (Fall)

Is Fluency Free-Operant Response-Response Chaining?Ogden R. Lindsley

University of Kansas and Behavior Research Company

This article briefly reviews behavioral fluency and its 10 products. Fluency development requiresthree of the four free-operant freedoms: the freedom to present stimuli at the learner's rhythm, thefreedom to form the response, and the freedom to speed at the learner's maximum frequency. Thearticle closes with several suggestions that fluent performing is really operant response-response(R-R) chaining, and recommends further controlled laboratory research on free-operant R-R chain-ing.Key words: chaining, fluency, fluency products, free operant, frequency, rate of response

This paper is dedicated to Eric C.Haughton, Harold P Kunzelmann, andClay M. Starlin, the pioneer discover-ers of fluency. Sadly, their discoveringin precision teaching and behavioranalysis was extinguished. Harold'sand Clay's discovering was extin-guished by the ignoring of their effec-tive classroom practices by the publiceducational establishment (Lindsley,1992).' Eric's discovering was extin-guished by terminal liver cancer (Lin-dsley, 1986).2 The loss of such brilliantinnovators is a major educational trag-edy.As educators we cannot do very

much about preventing liver cancer atthis time, but we should be able to pre-vent our public schools from investingtheir hard-won dollars in appealing in-structional fads (e.g., modem math and

Address correspondence to the author, 366North 1600 Road, Lawrence, Kansas 66049-9199 (E-mail: [email protected]).

' Harold and Clay were not alone in sufferingprofessional extinction. Two thirds of the 40 orso early contributors to precision teaching werealso extinguished by our public educational es-tablishment. Four have escaped into publicschool district central office positions of well-paid impotence. Eight are public school princi-pals, where I trained and placed them, assumingin error that there they would have some curric-ular power. Five have found handsome financialreinforcement elsewhere by spending their daysin the private practice of traditional nonchartedpsychotherapy.2Two others of our early contributors died of

natural causes. Diana Dean (1973) died of stom-ach cancer, and Nancy J. A. Johnson (1971,1972) died of multiple sclerosis.

whole language) when ample researchhas demonstrated vastly more effectiveclassroom practices (Bateman, 1991;Binder & Watkins, 1990; Engelmann,1992; K. Johnson & Layng, 1992; Wat-kins, 1988). Even lawsuits have hadlittle effect (Engelmann, 1991). For thesake of our millions of children beingsacrificed on the altar of educationalfad, please try to convince your localschools to adopt proven effective cur-ricula. For Eric, for Harold, and forClay, please try to give our childreneffective education, now.

FLUENCYDefinitions of fluency and its history

will not be repeated here because theyare accurately and extensively docu-mented in Binder's article in this issue.I will describe only a brief personalhistory of fluency experiences and re-search, and more important, ideasabout how and why some conditionsare required to build fluency. I collect-ed these ideas gradually over the past25 years since the discovery of the im-portance of building fluent perfor-mance. The paper gives special refer-ence to the crucial dependence of flu-ency upon the free operant and on re-sponse-response (R-R) chaining. Thesenotions might help readers to under-stand the surprising power of fluencytraining, and encourage careful quan-titative field and controlled laboratoryresearch into these important and long-neglected behavioral topics.

Fluency is doing things so fast that

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212 OGDEN R. LINDSLEY

they become second nature and areperformed without effort, without er-ror, without distraction, and can be per-formed for longer periods of time withgreat resistance to forgetting. The ef-fects define fluency in the same waythat the effects define reinforcement(Skinner, 1938). Monitoring responsefrequency is necessary in developingfluency. Fluent performance is alwayswell above 40 per minute and goes ashigh as 300 to 400 responses per min-ute for many behavioral pinpoints. Ingeneral, human behavior frequenciesare between 60 and 200 per minute.That is where we are comfortable andinterested, and where it is fun to per-form and fun to watch. Frequencies be-low 10 per minute produce distressingboredom in most learners.Members of our culture receive

more and more rapid stimulus presen-tations in movies. Commercial televi-sion frequently presents scene changesat above 100 per minute, sometimeswith four separate images on a quar-tered screen that gives viewers a po-tential stimulation frequency of 400scenes per minute! It is likely that themore experience viewers have withsuch rapid stimulus bombardment, theless tolerant they will be of slow (10per minute) public school curriculumpresentation.

Brief Frequency Monitoring

The first steps toward fluency beganin 1968 when Haughton moved frommonitoring the frequency of all class-room performance (35 to 50 min) asurged by me (Lindsley, 1964) to mon-itoring only a 10-min sample each day.Haughton (1971) did this initially sothat teachers, who were still doing thetimings for the students, could timeeach child during the class session eachday (Lindsley, 1992). I had urged thedirect technology transfer of direct andcontinuous measurement from labora-tory free-operant conditioning to aca-demic performance in school class-rooms. Haughton and his doctoral can-didate, Clay Starlin (1970, 1971), soon

moved on to several 1 -min timings perday for each child, and each timingwith different pinpointed performancesfor each learner. These brief timingswere originally called probes, and wereused to diagnose functionally in whichof several areas a student most neededhelp. Kunzelmann, in close contactwith Haughton,3 was using 1-min tim-ings once a day for 5 successive daysto diagnose learning problems from 13different basic tool skills, covering sixsay and seven write behaviors (Kun-zelmann, Cohen, Hulten, Martin, &Mingo, 1970, p. 280). These brief tim-ings were considered mainly diagnos-tic, although one of the three alterna-tive remedies suggested for academicproblems was to continue with daily1-min timings. It was Clay Starlin whofirst got the proficiency/aim/fluencyidea that high frequencies wouldsqueeze out errors and would permitgenerative curriculum leaps. He super-vised practicum students in a remedialreading clinic at the University of Or-egon from 1967 through 1970 andurged all the practicum students to tryout the proficiency idea in their class-rooms.At first I resisted this departure of

my students from the continuous mea-surement of the laboratory free operanttowards what I believed was merely asampling or testing procedure. I alsoreacted negatively to the term probe,which seemed to imply that the timingwas just an indicator of some under-lying behavior and not the performanceitself. Soon Haughton and Kunzelmannand their students produced such ex-cellent learning results from 1-min dai-ly practice sessions that I admitted myerror in resisting the 1-min timings. Atthis point I was proud of the fact thatmy students made major discoveries injust a few years out of graduate school.I learned from my students and gavethem the highest compliment by rap-idly adopting their discoveries and dis-

I Kunzelmann and Haughton often created to-gether as a team, even though they usually pub-lished as separate authors.

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tributing them nationwide in symposiaand workshops.

Free-Abbreviate TimingsIn the spring of 1972 I used 1-min

timings at the start and end of work-shops and university classes to mea-sure the participants' gain in knowl-edge in a way that would be comfort-able and have meaning. All first tim-ings should be with fluent performancesand therefore fun and not threatening,so I had participants freely abbreviatefacts about themselves for 1 min. Thenthe participants corrected their facts bysharing what their abbreviations meantwith their neighbor. This is a greatwarm-up exercise, and it also teacheshow to abbreviate, how to count ab-breviations, and how to structure factsfor fluent abbreviation. Next, I had theparticipants free-abbreviate facts aboutthe day's class topic. This provided thebefore-teaching baseline and demon-strated to the participants that pretest-ing need not be unpleasant-it can befun! At the end of the session, a clos-ing 1-min free-abbreviate of the classdaily topic was run to determine howmuch each participant learned in theclass session. I displayed these before-and-after frequencies on a StandardCeleration Chart at the overhead pro-jector to show the participants howtheir performance compared with oth-ers in the class. The frequency distri-butions also showed how much theclass middle frequency had shifted up(always a doubling and often timesfive). The distributions also showed theparticipants that group distributions arespread normally-the same distance upfrom the middle frequency as down ona multiply-divide scale; the StandardCeleration Chart normalizes perfor-mance distributions. Haughton andKunzelmann called these think-writetimings, but I renamed them free-ab-breviate.

SAFMEDS, Essay, and LectureTimings

In the fall of 1975 at the Universityof Kansas I started using 1-min timings

with both flash cards and practicesheets. Students in my graduate classin the supervision of instruction chart-ed their performances on daily Stan-dard Celeration Charts. By the fall of1978 I used flash cards practiced to flu-ency in all of my graduate classes. Icalled them SAFMEDS ("say all fasta minute each day shuffled"). Thisname was designed to prevent studentsfrom making the most common errorsin building fluency with cards. "Say"to prevent silent card viewing.4 "All"to prevent learning the 75-card deck 25cards at a time. "Fast" to prevent thecommon error of starting slow and ac-curate and then later trying to buildspeed. "A minute" to prevent the com-mon error of starting with longer tim-ings. "Each day" to prevent skippingweekend days and then trying to catchup with extra timings on Monday."Shuffled" to prevent the common er-ror of first trying to leam the cards inthe same order, then after "knowingthem," shuffling to try different orders.SAFMEDS was used both as a learningaid and a grading criterion. Soon all ofthe student tasks for all my courses in-cluded 1-min fluency timings, 10-minessay timings, and 10-min lecture tim-ings. For example, the learning tasksand grading criteria for my graduatecourse in the Supervision of Instruc-tion for the spring semester, 1979, aresummarized in Table 1. To get the let-ter grade at the bottom of a column thestudent had to perform at or above thenumber of facts listed in each of thesix timings in that column. No perfor-mance averages or medians were per-mitted. The students could stop andstart over in their final check-out grad-ing timings with their instructor and

4 My wife, Nancy Hughes, took my graduatecourse in projecting educational futures. Whenshe was ready for her final timing at over 75cards said correctly per minute, her timing withme was only 22 cards said correctly. When Iasked what was the matter, because she couldn'thave been that anxious, she said, "this is the firsttime that I have said them out loud!" Her mis-understanding of how to practice the cardsprompted me to create the preventive name.


TABLE 1

Learning tasks and grading criteriafor Lindsley's course in the Super-vision of Instruction, Spring 1979

Timing Grading(dura- Criteriation (count per

in minm- minutePerformance utes) correct)

Learning picture factsSee-say SAFMEDS 1 8 25 40Free-write essay 10 2 6 8Free-say-lecture 10 2 8 12

Supervision of instructionfacts

Free-write abbreviate 1 10 35 50Free-write essay 10 2 6 8Free-say lecture 10 2 8 12

Letter grade earned for the courseC B A

could repeat timings as often as theywished to earn a higher grade. Theywere permitted even to take an incom-plete grade for the course and afterthey had more practice, the next se-mester could earn a higher grade. Moststudents earned As in the course andthe number of facts required was grad-ually increased each semester until by1989 the criteria for an A was 75 factsin 1 min for Learning Picture see-saySAFMEDS and 100 facts in 1 min forSupervision of Instruction free-abbre-viate facts.

TEN PRODUCTS OFFLUENCY

In 1981 Haughton coined the acro-nym R/APS (retention/application per-formance standards) to state that per-formance frequency aims must be setby determining the frequencies that in-sure both retention and application ofskills. Haughton (1981) soon expandedhis acronym to REAPS (retention, en-durance, application, performancestandards), giving four fluency prod-ucts. By then I had 6 years of experi-ence building fluency in 30 offeringsof my graduate classes. Each class had

about 25 students, and each studentlearned two decks of 75 to 100 SAF-MEDS for a total of 50 fluency learn-ings per class. The 30 classes yielded1,500 SAFMEDS learning charts withgraduate-level adult learners. Severalproducts not stressed by Haughton inhis REAPS acronym jumped out ofthese data.

StabilityFirst, as an aviation cadet in World

War II, I daily practiced repeating myarmy serial number, the names of mycompany officers and Army Air Corpsgenerals, the names of both friendlyand enemy fighters, the words to AirForce marching songs, and other verbalchains until they could be recited per-fectly at 100 to 300 words per minuteany time on call from an upperclass-man. Similarly, repeated high-speedpractice of emergency aircraft exitdrills and field disassembly and assem-bly, while blindfolded, of the Army191 lAl automatic pistol in 1 min waspart of the official military training.The Air Corps believed that repeatedhigh-speed practice produced perfor-mance that could be accomplished un-der the stress of battle or in emergen-cies without error. The same stabilityand resistance to distraction occurredwhen my graduate students approachedfluency in their 1-min SAFMEDSpractice sessions. Only the beginnerswho made the mistake of starting atslow frequencies had their pace brokenby the noise of the other students say-ing SAFMEDS and slapping theircards down on the chair arms close by.This prompted me to convert the S inHaughton's REAPS to stability-a fifthproduct of fluency.

Fun

In workshops and university classes,it became clear that fluent performingwas fun. Participants often laughed andgiggled when comparing their frequen-cies correct after a fluent timing, andfluent timings are such fun that theycan be used as "ice breakers." Grum-

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bling, groaning, and critical commentsalways occur with adults when askedto perform a task in which they are notfluent, so I learned to start workshopsand class sessions with timings of flu-ent performances (e.g., abbreviatingfacts about themselves) and to closewith a similar fluent timing (e.g., factsabout the town or university). This issimilar to band directors and athleticteam coaches starting practice sessionswith fluent performance and closingthem with fluent performance to keepup team spirit. Fluent timings are soexhilarating and so much fun that theycan be used at any time in a lecture orworkshop to perk up participants whenthey are beginning to doze, gossip, orlook uncomfortable. The correcting ofa timing with a neighbor is always fun,so during the correction period I letparticipants talk it all out until theroom quiets down, taking about 10 to15 min after a 1-min timing.

UnderstandingMy graduate classes met one eve-

ning a week for 3 hr. Each semester thestudents' first assignment was to maketheir own deck of SAFMEDS from alist of words for the front and back ofeach card.' In the second class meeting,students said their cards as close to 60per minute as they could, but they typ-ically produced low correct frequenciesand high error frequencies. I did notexplain the meanings of the words andsymbols on the list and cards. One byone, students demanded to know whatsome particular word meant. The rotelearning of the cards produced a strongneed to know meaning. Some studentsalways figured out on their own whatsome cards meant, and told the mean-ings to others. The push of rote learn-ing to fluency produced the best inter-est in understanding that I had everwitnessed in my classes. Even when I

' Stephen A. Graf (1994, 1995) has used SAF-MEDS extensively in all of his large undergrad-uate classes. Ready-made SAFMEDS card decksare provided through the Youngstown Universitybookstore.

had tried "teaching to understanding"I could not produce such interest in thecontent.As a result of this experience, I be-

gan urging teachers to build fluencyfirst, and then students will take careof developing their own understanding.Building fluent performance first andthen answering students' questions wasmaximally efficient because the teacherused no valuable classroom time in-structing what students already knewor what they could learn on their own.

No CheatingThe eighth fluency product, no

cheating, seemed obvious to anyonewho has taught or practiced a perfor-mance to fluency. Other teachers, whocontinuously fussed with the problemsof student cheating, did not realize thatfluency assessment totally eliminatescheating. Teachers do not need to usedifferent versions of practice sheetsand tests or separate students withempty chairs during group timings.There is just not enough time for a stu-dent to peek at another's practice sheetand also give answers fluently. Peekingat another's sheet slows the learnerdown; sneaking looks at a crib sheetslows the learner down. There is noway a student can bring another stu-dent's behavior to a grading validationsession. Students can fake their charts,but cannot fake their fluent perfor-mances. The acronym fluency REAPSFUN, describing eight products of flu-ency, was used in workshops andclasses throughout the 1980s (Lind-sley, 1992).

ConfidenceI formalized the ninth product of flu-

ency development in 1993. In the late1960s I urged the teachers of learnerswith developmental delays to continuepractice sessions even after the learnershad reached a normal frequency rangefor that skill. I urged the teachers topractice their learners far above normalfrequencies to championship levels,because this would develop learner


confidence. Because the delayed learn-ers' charts seldom leveled off, the stu-dents could build up speed to fluentfrequencies beyond normal adultrange. When a disabled person canwrite letters, or do basic addition facts,or count items faster than their broth-ers, sisters, parents, and teachers, theygain real confidence-a confidencethat no amount of verbal strokingcould achieve. Binder (1990) called at-tention to confidence as a benefit offluency in the title of an article describ-ing fluency to industrial trainers.

Generativity

K. Johnson and Layng's (1992,1994) excellent recent articles on gen-erative instruction prompted me to for-malize what precision teachers foryears had called curriculum leaps(Stromberg & Chappell, 1990), andadd the 10th product of generativity.

These 10 products of fluency (Lind-sley, 1995) are the benefits of teachingand learning to fluency. The acronymfor these 10 products is REAPS FUNCG (retention, endurance, application,performance standards, stability, fun,understanding, no cheating, confi-dence, and generativity). Research sup-porting these fluency products is de-tailed in Binder's article in this issue;my purpose is to comment on the re-search presented by Binder and to sug-gest areas for potential laboratory re-search.

FLUENCY AND CHAINING

Skinner introduced chaining in1938, and it held free-operant condi-tioners' attention through the 1950s.He devoted 10 of the 457 pages in hisclassic text (Skinner, 1938) to chaining.He introduced the process of chainingas follows: "The law of chaining: Theresponse of one reflex may constituteor produce the eliciting or discrimina-tive stimulus of another" (p. 32).

Keller and Schoenfeld (1950) intro-duced their chapter on chaining withthe following quotation.

In leaming [the Lord's Prayer] we repeat it: thatis we pronounce the words in successive order,from the beginning to the end. ... Our suggestsFather, Father suggests which, which suggestsart, and so on, to the end. How remarkably thisis the case, any one may convince himself bytrying to repeat backwards, even a passage withwhich he is as familiar as the Lord's Prayer. (p.197)

Keller and Schoenfeld went on to de-fine chaining by saying one responsecommonly produces the stimulus foranother.

Diagrams

Skinner (1938) diagrammed chain-ing as a series of stimulus-response(S-R), S-R, S-R, each R being not onlya response but also the stimulus for thenext response. This is functional de-scription rather than topographical andapplies the strong S-R law that all be-havior follows the S-R linkage, evenresponse chains. It was hard for Skin-ner to give up the stimulus and its cen-tral position in reflex theory. For ex-ample, he called rewards that followthe behavior reinforcing stimuli, tryingto make the point that they were justas much a part of the reflex as the stim-uli that come before the behavior. Thisuse of the word stimulus to describe aconsequence created confusion withthe general public.

Keller and Schoenfeld followedSkinner's functional logic that each re-sponse is the stimulus for the next re-sponse, and they diagrammed a chainas follows (1950, p. 200): SD4--R4SD3-R35SD2-R2-SD1 R,. Mostrecent chaining diagrammers (Gold-water & Acker, 1995) take the samestrong S-R position and diagram it sim-ilarly to Skinner and Keller andSchoenfeld, with each R being the Sfor the next R, and so on.

In the fall of 1951, while I was agraduate student in experimental psy-chology at Harvard in Skinner's por-tion of the proseminar course, I disa-greed with Skinner's diagram of behav-ior chains and asserted that all we ob-served and recorded were a series ofchained responses. Why not just admit'

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that response-response linking occursand recognize that it is a little differentfrom discrimination learning, whichclearly is controlled by environmentalstimuli? This touched a tender point inSkinner, and I quit trying to have Skin-ner admit that chaining was simplyR-R linking. However, I did not giveup this notion; I just gave up trying toconvince Skinner. Recently, Michaeland Shafer (1995), in their state nota-tion system for teaching, have droppedout the S, diagramming chaining assimply RI and R2. This simplificationof chaining diagrams clarifies the pro-cess for their students and adheresmore closely to the observed facts, inthat only linked responses are record-ed.

Recently my experience with work-shop practice sheets shows that learn-ers who point to the next item on thesheet learn quicker than learners whodo not point (Lindsley, 1994). Pointingto the next item is not only necessarybut is highly specific, because pointingwith a pencil point produces quickerlearning than pointing with the finger.The finger partially obscures the view.This need to overtly respond to eachquestion is one of the many things thatmake us think that when a performancebecomes fluent it is then chained. It isnot merely see-say or S-R. The seemust be physically responded to formaximum fluency building. Thereforeit is point-see-say, clearly an R-R-Rchain.

If songs and poems were simplyS-R, S-R, then every word in the serieswould be the stimulus for the nextword as diagrammed by Skinner, Kel-ler and Schoenfeld, and Goldwater andAcker. When given any word in the se-ries, one can come up with the nextword, but most of us cannot do this.We have to go back to a phrase begin-ning and "get a running start." Thenwe listen as we sing, to hear whichword we sing after the questionedword. This looks more like R-R-R-R-Rthan S-R, S-R, S-R, S-R, S-R.

Carly Simon stammered as a childbut could easily sing without stammer-

ing (Brenner, 1995). Do stammerershave trouble with S-R performance butnot with R-R chaining? Maybe weshould train stammerers to talk fast andin rhythm, thus sing-talking their stam-mer away. Would talking at speedsabove 40 words per minute squeezeout the stimulus steps in S-R, S-R, S-Rand go to direct, smooth R-R-R per-formance? I believe these questions arefascinating, and provide a rich area forboth field and laboratory research.

Popularity

Chaining has been very popular.Many psychology departments had aperforming rat or pigeon that did anelaborate chain of responses on com-mand. These demonstrations impressedthe students, public, and press, but pro-duced little research on the process.Chaining and its related topic, shaping,have had little study and little writing.In the author's topic count of 17 ofSkinner's books and four other operantclassics, only 551 pages of over 5,000described chaining. Ten of these pageswere in Skinner's (1938) The Behaviorof Organisms, and 34 pages were inKeller and Schoenfeld's (1950) Prin-ciples ofPsychology. Only 41 pages ofthe 5,000 were devoted to shaping.John Cooper (personal communication,October 26, 1995) counted the pagesdevoted to shaping and chaining in thesix most-used textbooks in applied be-havior analysis and found, in Albertoand Troutman (1995), 11 of 522 pages;Cooper, Heron, and Heward (1987), 35of 651 pages; Malott, Whaley, andMalott (1993), 30 of 468 pages; Martinand Pear (1996), 24 of 455 pages;Sulzer-Azaroff and Mayer (1991), 26of 644 pages; and Walker and Shea(1995), 7 of 384 pages. The total num-ber of pages on shaping and chainingin these six popular textbooks is 133of 3,124 pages. This proportion (1 of23) is five times higher than the pro-portion of 1 of 100 found in the earlierclassics, demonstrating a fivefold in-crease in popularity. Shaping andchaining have been further popularized


in the popular press by professional an-imal trainers (Pryor, 1975, 1984;Wilkes, 1994).

It is surprising that so little researchhas been done on shaping and R-Rchaining because much of the reputa-tion of operant conditioning and be-havior analysis is based on its powerfor building chains and shaping behav-ior. Chaining, along with shaping, wasperhaps free-operant conditioning'sgreatest selling point and attentiongatherer (Skinner, 1951). In the 1950s,a free-operant conditioner could get in-stant acclaim by shaping a new organ-ism.6 Teaching an elaborate and inter-esting chain also produced acclaim. Ireceived some acclaim for teaching theweightlifting rat Samson.7 The ping-pong playing pigeons were also a pop-ular class demonstration in Skinner'sHarvard undergraduate Natural Sci-ence 114 course.8 If Skinner hadnamed his pigeons Ping and Pong, per-haps they would have been even morepopular.Few laboratory researchers experi-

mented with chaining and shaping an-

6Joe Brady shaped cats at Walter Reed. Char-lie Ferster shaped chimps at Orange Park. Ishaped dogs at Boston University MedicalSchool. One summer there was a rumor that Pe-ter Dews had shaped an octopus in Italy! I wasworking with a praying mantis and had devel-oped a paper-clip operandum when the mantisdrowned in its bottle-cap drinking cup.

I At Columbia in 1952, Thom Verhave traineda rat to do an elaborate 10-response chain ofbehavior (Donald A. Cook, personal communi-cation, March 29, 1996). In 1957 at BarnardCollege, and then later at Brown University,Rosemary Pierrell and Gil Sherman trained a ratnamed Barnabus to climb a staircase, push downa drawbridge, cross the bridge, climb a ladder,climb hand-over-hand up a chain to a car, pedalthe car through a tunnel, climb another flight ofstairs, run through a tube, step into a waitingelevator, and finally raise a university flag up apole; this started the elevator down to the groundfloor, where he pushed a lever and received onepellet of food. This 11-member chain broughtRosemary and Gil instant recognition, and gen-erations of Barnabus continued to entertain andamaze at Brown for many years (Pierrel & Sher-man, 1963).

'The notes for this course were later pub-lished as Science anld Human Behavior (Skinner,1953).

imals to perform different skilled actsthrough the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.The laboratory research on shapingcontained only a few studies on auto-shaping of key pecking (e.g., Brown &Jenkins, 1968). Laboratory research onchaining was usually limited to oper-anda or schedule chaining (e.g., Kel-leher, 1966). Marian and Keller Bre-land, who with Norman Guttman hadtrained pigeons to guide missiles dur-ing World War II (Skinner, 1960),stayed on at General Mills in Minne-apolis to train animals for advertisingand entertainment at state fairs. At first,they were about the only two to main-tain a strong interest in topographicalshaping and chaining. They not onlymaintained an interest, they made a liv-ing at it. They went on to establish An-imal Behavior Enterprises in Arkansasand at one time employed over 75trainers who produced advertising andstate fair acts. They consulted with andinitiated the trainers at the Sea LifeParks and the trainers of the whalesand dolphins for United States Navyundersea rescue and patrol. The Bre-lands received a lot of press coveragebut published little in scientific jour-nals. I looked up to the Brelands as mi-nor gods, not only because they triedto use the free operant to help winWorld War II but because they weremaking a living at selling behavior, andthey were almost single-handedlykeeping alive two of the free operant'smost powerful methods.

Breland and Breland published anarticle (1961) that described "instinc-tive drift" (e.g., chickens shaped todance by lifting their feet straight upgradually drift back to their instinctivescratching, which did not impressfarmers at all). Most laboratory operantconditioners did not appreciate the in-stinctive drift article because it madeoperant conditioning appear to be weakcompared to instincts and ethology.Yet, the facts were exactly the oppo-site. The Brelands had shown thatshaped chains of behavior were ex-tremely durable, enduring for yearswithout practice. It was only the form

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of the carefully shaped response thatwould change, and then only when itwas very close to stronger behaviorthat the animal had engaged in sincebirth. The permanence of shaped andchained performance that the Brelandsdeveloped impressed me.

Later, Karen Pryor (1975, 1984), askilled former dolphin trainer from Ha-waii's Sea Life Park, published twovery well-written books, portions ofwhich describe shaping and chaining.However, these were written for thegeneral public, and because most free-operant conditioners did not know theyexisted, they did not spark academicinterest. Pyror has regularly attendedconventions of the Association for Be-havior Analysis since 1990, and sheand Gary Wilkes (1994) sparkedenough interest among trainers and be-havior analysts to form a Trainers'Special Interest Group. Trainer has be-come the term for those who make aliving by shaping and chaining animalbehavior. The field is rich with subtlenew techniques refined by trainers overthe decades since 1950.The myth that only laboratories can

discover basic variables is not true. Itis true that only the laboratories canisolate variables, but basic variablesand procedures are often discovered inapplication. Fluency (Haughton, 1972;Starlin, 1970) and its products werediscovered in application of the freeoperant in precision teaching clas-sooms. The Brelands discoverted "tar-geting" with a target stick in shapingtheir show animals. Wilkes (1994,1995, 1996) has recently discoveredthe use of the word "wrong" to signalthe animal that the response was closeto the target response, but not yet closeenough. "Wrong" is like "good try"and helps the learning animal to widenits response class. The training field isrich with subtle techniques refined bytrainers since 1942. 1 hope the contri-butions made by trainers will renew in-terest in more laboratory research onthese important but neglected topics. Ihave long suggested (Lindsley, 1964),and still hope, that someone will sys-

tematically use real shaping and chain-ing to improve the motor and socialskills of our developmentally delayedcitizens.

Chained Motor Learning EnduresKaren Pyror (1984) stated in Don't

Shoot the Dog, "Muscles 'learn' slow-ly but well; once something has be-come part of your movement patternsit is hard to unlearn" (p. 133). It is notnecessary to relate here all the anec-dotes that motor chains once learnedare never forgotten. For example, bi-cycle riding, guitar playing, and othergross and fine motor skills endure fora lifetime with very little practice.However, to be maintained at peakchampionship fluency, they must bepracticed daily.

I trained our stallion Jack donkey,the Silver Butte Jack, (a) to run after abasketball, carry it to a basket, and tossit in; (b) to stand on a box and ring aschool bell and then stamp his foot thecorrect number of times to "answer"simple arithmetic questions like, "Sil-ver, what's 2 times 3?"9; (c) to open amail box and put in a wooden "letter";(d) to carry a pick in his mouth in pa-rades and circle on command in frontof the judges' stand; (e) to pick updropped gloves, neckerchiefs, or tools;and several other chained skills (Hen-derson, 1980). During the first year orso of training, my wife and I ran Silverthrough all his tricks almost every day,because we thought he would forgetthem if we didn't. Silver was evictedfrom our backyard in town, and wefound him a barn and corral in thecountry. Driving to Silver's barn andrunning him through his tricks took

9 The trick used was to very slightly move theindex finger of my right outstretched hand (bothhands were outstretched) immediately after thestamp that Silver should stop at to correctly an-swer the question. Of course, a few times Istopped Silver one stamp early or one stamp lateso that he would make a small error to enhancethe deception. I got the idea for this trainingfrom the classic case of Kluge Hans, the geniushorse from Germany, who picked up almost im-perceptible cues from his handler.


close to an hour each day. Eventually,we stopped daily practice because ourresponse cost was too high! Monthsand even years have gone by withoutSilver performing one of his tricks(e.g., standing on a box and ringing aschool bell held in his mouth). Whenthe bell and box are brought out andSilver is signaled, he takes the bell inhis mouth, jumps up on his box, andshaking his head rings the bell loudly.He runs off his chain perfectly withouterror even after months without prac-tice. This fits with stories from MarianBreland Bailey, Karen Pryor, and GaryWilkes. These motor chains are ex-tremely durable. The endurance prod-uct of fluency is clearly demonstratedhere.

Understanding after Fluency

"Figuring it out" makes a perfor-mance associative or S-R. Is it possiblethat trying to understand a perfor-mance before performing it fluently notonly delays fluency building but setsan S-R association ceiling at about 30to 40 per minute? This associative ceil-ing appears to delay the start of fluencybuilding and also to impede and slowthe performance. In building my grad-uate students' SAFMEDS fluency, Ifound that those students who usedelaborate memory aids to learn thecards had ceilings around 30 correct re-sponses per minute. What I called their"cushion shots" likely produced theceilings. For example, (a) a studentlearned that the capital of Illinois wasthe same as a town in Massachusettswest of Boston, (b) a student learnedthe name of the learning picture (cor-rect and error celerations displayed ona Standard Celeration Chart) with cor-rect responses accelerating and errorsdecelerating was "jaws." Rather thanlearn the name of the learning picturewith correct responses decelerating anderrors accelerating directly as "snowplow," the student used a memory aidto learn that the "snow plow" pictureis the opposite direction of the "jaws"picture. Understanding often associates

an answer with a web of other answers,all of which slow up emitting thepoint-see-say chain. Perhaps it is betterto rote-learn the chain and not to relateit to other things until it is fluent. Un-derstanding might make it S-R and setits ceiling at 30 per minute, thus notonly delaying but also putting a lowceiling on performance frequency.

S-R Switches to R-R?

Is the magic 40 per minute the rateat which S-R switches to R-R chainingand the products of fluency really be-gin? It is clear that this notion has notbeen proven. It is merely a stronghunch, and that is why it is in the fromof a question. Possibly performanceswith frequencies above 40 per minutemove from S-R control (cortical stuff)to direct R-R chaining control (cere-bellar stuff).'0A clear plateau or leveling off for a

week or two at about 30 cards correctper minute appears on a small numberof SAFMEDS learning charts (1 to 3out of 10). Students complain at thistime, saying there is no way they cango above 30 per minute. This is wherewe tried the regular pacing methods at60 per minute, which only disturbedthem more. Some students admittedthat they had to give up the memoryaids that were holding them up, andthat unlearning them was very hard todo. It is possible that these learners dis-play the point at which their associa-tive learning has to give way to directR-R chaining to reach the higher fluentfrequencies.

Figure 1 displays one such workingStandard Celeration Chart. I had itphotographed as Ann K. made it. Ann

0 From 1946 through 1950 I was a physio-logical psychologist studying with Carl Pfaff-man at Brown University. My master's thesis(Lindsley, 1950) was determining the conduc-tion velocities and diameters of the "c" fibersof the chorda tympani nerve of the rat. The chor-da tympani nerve runs across the basilar mem-brane (providing an ideal recording opportunity)to the anterior two thirds of the tongue where itconducts taste sensations. So, you can permit me-a bit of reminiscent physiologizing.

FLUENCY 221

CAl F'

NO 1 I K

p 'th;A4 I i6* 5 A12 16 20

101* 30 er rrinut r'rj,.tlf=~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ., . . ..* | .1

10 102 04 0807 09 0 1010104OPR t3 Dr. bvhIcq SUCCESSIVE CALENDAR DAYS A......SaLSi t\ LI' t4AFNED

Q~~ ~~~~-............_ ! S" |o

osPIVISORADVISER IMANAI.III RIIAVR AC;nett20

Fgre1 An K.' wokn Stndr Celerto Chr of her dailyl RLearning Pitr fat SAF-n

MES-mleny rctc sssos.Te rrwponso30per mint,wihi h lta

feun tha she hd_ Tbe thu to o o- f a 7

we her pef c wt fm S, SR S toIN R-R R, R-R chi

Fiue1 n .swrigSadadClrto hr fhrdil erigPcuefcsSFMESl-mnfunypatc esos h ro onst 0prmnt,wihi h ltaZrqec htsehdt ra hog og nt lec t7 ad orc e iue stiwhere her performance went from S-R, S-R, S-R to R-R, R-R, R-R chaining

was a student in my Supervision of In-struction course, and she charted hersee-say learning of Learning PictureFacts SAFMEDS (98 cards in thedeck). Her chart covers daily SAF-MEDS performances from June 3through July 15, 1984, from left toright. A frequency of one per day(0.001 per minute) is at the bottom ofthe chart. One per minute is halfwayup the chart, where Ann has drawn adashed line indicating the counting pe-riod floor, which means that she waspracticing her SAFMEDS in 1-mindaily timings. The top of the chart is 1million a day (1,000 per minute).The bottom line charted by Ann

plots the number of separate 1-mintimings that she practiced each day.The timings bounce from one a day to10 a day with the middle around five.The second charted line up from the

bottom is the number of minutes thatAnn spent studying the course in ad-dition to and including her timings.The minutes are read on the right sideof the chart, and go down in size asthey go up the chart. The time that Annspent studying bounces from 100 minon June 5 (her first day when she madeher own cards) to 5 min on June 22when she did only one timing.The third charted line up from the

bottom is Ann's frequency of hermissed cards. The misses are chartedas little x's, representing the total of thenumber she said "go" to or said in-correctly that day. The misses are theones that pair with the timing with thehighest correct frequency for that day.Ann's misses were once as high as 26per minute and decelerated by four perweek to reach 0 per minute by thefourth week on June 25.


The top charted line is the numberof correct responses per minute duringthe timing with the highest number ofcorrect responses for each day. Ann'scorrect responses accelerated fromabout 12 per minute to around 30 in 1week from June 5 to June 13, andstayed at 30 correct or below until June23. This is the kind of plateau thatmight occur in the switch from S-R toR-R chaining. True, there was a week-end trip in there with no practice, butthere still is a clear flat place at 30 perminute in Ann's chart. Once that bar-rier at 30 per minute was broken, herfrequency easily accelerated up through50 per minute on July 1, and on up to70 per minute on July 12. Ann reachedher fluency aim in 6 weeks.

Learning Native LanguagesNative languages are always learned

at normal talking speed. The child'sfamily members do not speak slowlyso the children can learn. Children startbabbling about 60 to 100 babbles perminute. Most of the babbles are incor-rect words, so the correct word fre-quency is very low. Gradually the fre-quency of correct words increases andthe frequency of incorrectly pro-nounced words decreases. I believethat native language is acquired as anR-R chain using nursery rhymes, al-phabet songs, children's songs, andother repeated rhythmical verbalchains. Understanding of what eachword means comes after fluent usagein context. Native language is learnedvery much as we teach fluency. Theonly missing things are the 1-min tim-ings and the Standard CelerationCharts.

BASIC DISCOVERY INAPPLICATION

The discovery of fluency and itsproducts in precision teaching class-rooms shows that basic discoveries canbe made in application, and often are.Discoveries from applications in thebehavioral sciences are similar to dis-coveries in the physical sciences. Care-

fully measured engineering (aircraftdesign) can teach things to aerodynam-ics in physics. Empirically discoveredmedical treatments can focus physio-logical and pharmacological laborato-ries on entirely new research vistas. Inexactly the same way, carefully mea-sured classroom instruction (precisionteaching) has brought new basic con-cepts to behavior analysis. The catch isthat discoveries from the field cannotbe carefully and parametrically re-searched in the field. They need thefine physical control and ability to iso-late variable combinations that are pro-vided by well-conducted laboratory re-search.

Perhaps the notion that the fieldshould apply basic discoveries made inthe laboratories is in the wrong direc-tion. Perhaps laboratory research is sodetailed and the controls so expensivethat it cannot rapidly screen new ideasas fast as can an innovative field prac-titioner. Perhaps the laboratories shouldrefine and polish some of the new basicideas that have been demonstrated inthe field.

THE TITLE IS A QUESTIONThe reason that the title of this arti-

cle is a question rather than a boldstatement is that this is a very stronghunch rather than an experimentallyproven fact. The evidence for this isindirect. It is circumstantial evidence.There are many circumstances compel-ling this hunch, and in the past most ofmy hunches of this strength have prov-en true under laborious laboratory la-bor. So, you few noble laboratory la-borers, here's a very strong hunch bya proven huncher, hot from a powerfulnew field of application for you todress up, superprove, refine, and fur-ther discover!

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Documents

Is Fluency Free-Operant Response-Response Chaining?