This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]On: 13 November 2014, At: 01:42Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Educational PsychologistPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hedp20

What are we trying to understand and improve?Educational research as Leerlaufreaktion.Ernst Z. Rothkopf aa Bell Laboratories , Murray Hill, New Jersey, 07974Published online: 01 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Ernst Z. Rothkopf (1973) What are we trying to understand and improve? Educational research asLeerlaufreaktion. , Educational Psychologist, 10:2, 58-66, DOI: 10.1080/00461527309529092

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00461527309529092

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in thepublications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representationsor warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoevercaused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Educational Psychologist, 1973 Vol. 10, No. 2, 58-66.

WHAT ARE WE TRYING TOUNDERSTAND AND IMPROVE?

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH ASLEERLAUFREAKTION.

ERNST Z. ROTHKOPFBell Laboratories

ABSTRACT

The problems that educational research are supposed to solve have been poorlyanalyzed and the basic phenomena that we are trying to understand have not beenclearly described. Educational experimenters often resemble Leerlaufreaktionenin lower animals, i.e., complex, highly integrated activities that take place despitethe absence of an appropriate environmental occasion.

We have tended to forget the practical origins of science and have allowedourselves to be dominated by overly abstract ideas that betray our goals. Ex-perimenters require tangible events to think and wonder about in order to improvetheir intuitions and in order to generate and test ideas that will deepen ourunderstanding of nature and make a real difference in the practical world. Betterobservations of what actually goes on in instructional situations are thereforeneeded and more detailed records of teaching and learning must be kept. Aninstructional record-keeping system called a course memory is described.

What I want to do in the present paper is to consider two relatively simplemindedquestions that trouble me in doing research. The first is about models for applyinglaboratory findings to practical teaching situations—and I want to particularly raise thepoint of whether it wouldn't be prudent to hedge our bets on product-oriented, goal-centered instructional development. The second question is what are the instructionalproblems that we are trying to solve and what are we trying to understand. Here I wantto talk particularly about finding out what really goes on in schools.

These questions require more attention than they are now getting. Trying to answerthem deserves our energies in the 1970's. I believe that failure to deal with these prob-lems in the past is responsible for the sense of frustration and the intellectual malaise thatone often encounters in the instructional and the learning laboratory.

The reason that I want to discuss these general problems is that I am concerned thata substantial portion of educational research is not producing useful results. I am nottalking about work that is technically flawed or executed in a slipshod manner. RatherI am worried about studies carried on by very able people; work that is carefully planned,and that is executed in a painstaking, careful, and often ingenious manner. What worriesme is that the problems that are supposed to be solved by this work are often not clear,that the schemes by which we have thought to apply laboratory results to practical situa-tions have not been sufficiently analyzed, and that the basic phenomena which we claim

1 Invited address on the theme Research on Education in the 1970's presented at the AmericanEducational Research Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, February, 1973. Requests for re-prints should be sent to Ernst Z. Rothkopf, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974.

58

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AS LEERLAUFREAKTION

we are trying to understand are not as obvious as they ought to be considering the primi-tive state of development of instructional science.

Consider a person receiving a Ph.D. in educational research or psychology. He islikely to have been endowed by his school with a variety of skills. He has learned aboutexperimental design and statistics. He is familiar with at least journalistic or political con-ceptions of the current problems of schools and he has become conversant with theoriesabout learning and instruction. The new Ph.D. has read the literature on learning andinstruction, he knows about the more salient results, and he is familiar with the methodsused in the latest rash of fashionable experiments. These have been discussed in hisseminars with sufficient attention to the mechanical details so as to assure that he willbe able to embark on a series of experiments on his own almost as soon as he starts onhis first job. Furthermore the new Ph.D. is more often than not endowed with greatenergy and zeal and is chock-full of good intentions.

This is a heady mixture of intellectual tools. It is sure to keep the more energeticgraduate busy and also assures that the page allotments of our journals are fully used.It is enough to provide the new researcher with a maintenance schedule of small suc-cesses that are twice as savory because they are often also laced with disappointed ex-pectations.

The graduate schools have thus succeeded in giving the student what is technicallynecessary to do research and to report his findings. The great volume of papers appear-ing in the literature testifies eloquently that graduate schools are at least technicallyeffective and that educational research is a lively enterprise in the United States.

All this would seem to be grounds for optimism. Talking to graduate students and toother young researchers, or even to our more seasoned colleagues proves to be lesscheering. I like to ask researchers when I meet them to tell me what truths they havediscovered lately. More often than not the answer is a description of the details of theexperiment which they are currently doing or which they have recently completed.These descriptions can rarely be faulted and their report of results is often very explicit.If one asks however why the experiment Was performed, what phenomena were to beunderstood or what instructional problem was to be solved, the language of their re-sponse frequently becomes curiously stilted and abstract. Words like variables andoptimization appear in the speech. People talk about making learning more effective,about speeding learning, and about methods for improving instructional design. Onesenses a kind of remoteness from palpable phenomena and a simplistic conception ofhow their work would make a difference in the world that could collapse quickly underrealistic scrutiny. I frequently walk away with the feeling that it would be difficult tosuccessfully explain the aim of these experimental adventures to one's parents and toinquisitive laymen.

I tried to think of hard evidence by which I could convince you that these impres-sions are correct. Short of analyzing some representative papers in detail I don't knowhow to do it. However you may at least be willing to admit that the slow progress ofinstructional research and its uncertain impact on schools is not inconsistent with mypessimistic outlook.

The great bulk of the results produced by instructional research appear to have verylittle visible impact upon the schools and our theoretical conceptions of learning and ofinstruction show very small cumulative growth. The years pass, one by one, and thejournal articles recede with them into obscure grayness while the schools do their job

59

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

ERNST Z. ROTHKOPF

sometimes in new ways, sometimes in old. New words are sometimes used by school-men and these have often come from the pen of researchers and theoreticians. But weare uncertain how the researcher really has changed the school or whether instructionalresearch has really made a difference in the world. A realistic and objective person mayreasonably doubt whether the many ingenious experiments, the elegant little statisticalminuets, and the sonorous theories have produced much that is of practical significanceor of lasting intellectual value.

Ethologists have observed captive starlings (sturnus vulgaris) going through the highlysterotyped aerial acrobatics of their insect-hunting maneuvers without another livingthing within the empty air of their cages besides themselves (Lorenz, 1937). The maleof a small fresh water fish, .the stickleback (gasterosteus aculeatus) performs a complexzigzag dance in an early part of its mating ritual. Mating, as many of you know, is asocial interaction. In the stickleback the zigzag dance of the male ordinarily does nottake place without the presence of a pregnant female serving as releaser. Ethologistshave however sometimes observed the elaborate zigzag dance without any female orwithout any other fish in the vicinity (Tinbergen, 1951, p. 62).

Lorenz has called the performance of these complex, highly coordinated reactionswithout the presence of a suitable releaser, Leerlaufreaktion. This literally means anempty run reaction but it is usually rendered in the English literature as vacuum reactionor sometimes as overflow reaction. According to Lorenz, certain basic well integratedresponses occur in certain species when two conditions are met. These are: 1) thatinternal hormonal secretions and the tension system associated with them exceeds acertain minimum level, and 2) that a suitable and highly specific releasing stimulus occurs.When no such specific releaser appears in the immediate environment of the animal, thetension system continues to increase until it finally gets so high that the reaction willtake place in essentially complete form even in the absence of a suitable releaser. SuchLeerlauf reactions do not benefit the species. They are highly elaborated acts for whichno suitable occasion exists and which serve no purpose.

I would like to suggest the possibility that many of the experiments that we performin our laboratories resemble the Leerlaufreaktionen of Lorenz. Please do not dismissthis parallel lightly simply because you perceive it as a precious or perhaps captiousrhetorical ploy. What I am asking is whether much of the elaborate behavior of theeducational experimenter occurs without suitable occasion and simply because internaltensions have exceeded a certain critical level. My nominee for the internal tensions inthese cases are of course the almost unbearably good and lofty intentions with which weequip our graduate students. However, some of my more cynical colleagues have sug-gested that more venal drive states are sometimes also involved.

Perfecting Instructional Materials-An Unrealistic Model?I am haunted by the suspicion that one of the reasons why so much instructional

experimentation seems to resemble Leerlaufreaktionen is that it is predicated on an un-realistic model of how learning research will produce instructional consequences. Theunrealistic model stresses the discovery of what will make instructional materials moreeffective. More often than not the emphasis is on structural characteristics of the ma-terials, for example, sequence or organization. The stress on the effectiveness of instruc-tional material is intimately wedded to the manufacturing approach to instructionaldevelopment, an approach that relies heavily on the notion of an instructional product

60

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AS LEERLAUFREAKTION

which is developed in order to satisfy highly specific goals.The concept of the design of a more effective instructional unit that is to be used in

the distant future and under partially known conditions is a weak rationale for experi-mentation and the notion of a fairly self-sufficient instructional package that is aimedat accomplishing a predetermined instructional goal may not be good economics inmost situations. The idea of experiments to build our ability for effective instructionaldesign is closely tied to a widely accepted rather ambitious conception that the courseof instruction can be optimized by the systematic arrangement of instructional compo-nents. I have elsewhere referred to this conception as the calculus of practice (Rothkopf,1968). Both the notion of the stable, goal-centered instructional package and of thecalculus of practice are the intellectual fruits of a manufacturing philosophy of instruc-tional development that has dominated our thinking for a number of years.

On balance it appears to me that the package concept is good but there is littlecause for optimism about the early usefulness of a calculus of practice. Everything pointsto the likelihood that instructional development will have to depend on the method ofsuccessive approximations i.e., try-out: revision cycles, for a long time to come. Thismay simply turn out to be a challenge on which research will thrive. But I want toraise the question whether it might be desirable to hedge our bets on the product-centered, goal-oriented approach to rational improvements in instructional effectivenesswhich is now commanding so much of our attention.

The reasoning behind this question is simple. Carefully developed educational pro-ducts are very expensive—so expensive as a matter of fact, that it is very likely uneconom-ical for relatively small consumers such as universities or medium-size school systems.The unfavorable economics.are particularly apparent when a relatively short useful lifecan be anticipated for the package. High costs suggest centralized development andmanufacture as a method for bringing instructional packages to reasonable price levels.Here we run into the problem of discrepancy between the manufacturer's product goalsand those of the user-i.e., the teacher or other responsible individual at the buying andusing institutions. Discrepancies about goals are not much of a problem for those fewinstructional tasks, such as initial reading and calculating skills, that involve huge num-bers of students and for which there is a substantial consensus about instructional goals.But many disagreements about objectives crop up in higher level courses. Differentviews about subject matter and the autonomy of teachers is at stake here. It would beimprudent to vote for uniformity for economic reasons even if it were possible to do so.

The sum of my argument is that narrowly goal-oriented products may have a morelimited future in instruction than is usually anticipated. Research on factors in a cal-culus of practice may therefore produce very little difference in the world because it isso closely linked to the product concept as a model for application.

The rationale behind experiments that are supposed to reveal determinants of in-structional effectiveness and that are centered on the nature of the instructional mater-ials is deceptively convincing because these experiments tend to give the impressionthat they have very practical goals. And yet there is room for serious doubt as to whetherthe notion of effective instructional material, particularly as far as structural aspectsare concerned, is a very practical idea. Some of the reasons for thinking so have beendescribed above. In addition, because of certain considerations which I have discussedelsewhere (Rothkopf, 1972), structural properties of stimulus materials seem to accountfor an extremely small proportion of the instructional variance. The activities of the

61

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

ERNST Z. ROTHKOPF

student,—their role in translating the instructional materials into internal representationare many times more powerful and these student activities are largely under the controlof the instructional environment rather than the structure of materials.

It seems to me that a more attractive alternative to goal-oriented instructional pro-ducts is to select instructional material from what is available and to provide the studentwith the aids necessary to help him achieve his or her teacher's goals. Providing studentswith supports and adjunct aids suggests very markedly different research approaches thanthat suggested by a development philosophy that stresses the nature of instructionalmaterials.

My own bet has been on research that bears on adjunct aids and on the student'srole in subverting obstreperous, non-optimal materials to his own purposes, (e.g., Roth-kopf, 1971). In sum, what I am proposing is that we examine with some care the wayin which our research is ultimately tied to practical uses. The researcher, if he has prac-tical uses in mind should prudently examine whether the model for the practical appli-cation of his findings and of his theories can stand the test of feasibility and economy.An experiment that is rationalized as applicable to an unrealistic or impractical use mayhave no applicable usefulness at all.

Queering Our Intuitions.The cultural traditions of the Western world include the belief that the growth of

scientific understanding and science-based technology will increase our ability to carryany human activity, including teaching. The history of the remarkable accomplishmentsof Western technology supports this belief strongly and unfortunately has invested re-search and experimentation with the force of magic and religion. We, the practitionersof an infant science live in an age in which the elegant theoretical accomplishments of theadvanced physical sciences are taken as the model for all scientific activities. We havetherefore tended to forget the practical origins of science and participate consequentlyin a highly abstract ritual that betrays our high goals. Our research is dominated byoverly abstract conceptions of learning and the instructional process and this distortsour perception of what is important and queers our intuitions. What can we do toremedy the situation? I believe that the answer is that we better find out what reallygoes on in schools. That should be one of our most important goals for the 1970's.

In the present state of our science, abstract and theoretical questions cannot precedethe practical. The pursuit of abstract and theoretical questions flourishes in advancedsciences and yields valuable results. In new and immature sciences the practical hasprecedence because it serves as a kind of cultural reconnaissance for the more interestingscientific problems. The emergence and growth of the physical sciences was aided bythe long history of the practical arts. The elegant formulations of thermodynamicscould not have come into being without the prior invention of the steam engine. Prac-tical arts served as a kind of heuristic reconnaissance for the scientific efforts to come.The lifting, moving, bending, and heating of the builder and the smith served as areconnaissance for the important variables of mechanics. Mixing, stirring and boilingwere a reconnaissance for chemistry. Such practical operations had immediately per-ceivable attributes and immediately perceivable consequences which could be remem-bered and which were well suited to the inductive capacity of the intelligent humanobserver.

Schooling similarly has had a long history as a practical human endeavor. However,

62

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AS LEERLAUFREAKTION

neither actions nor consequences were ordinarily sharply explicit nor was it typicallythought possible and necessary to describe these in an unambiguous manner. Moreover,these acts take place over an extended period of time and their consequences tend toreveal themselves slowly. The history of education has been the history of manyprosaic and a few bold voyages of exploration in which logs were poorly kept.

For this reason it is not surprising that the learning theorists concerned with instruc-tion and the educational researcher have been in the thrall of excessively abstract con-ceptions of the teaching process. This unhappy state of affairs has consistently under-mined our efforts and made many of our activities seem as meaningless as the starlinghunting for victims in the empty air of his cage. Highly abstract conceptions of learningand of teaching have not served the researcher's intuition well. They have distorted thesense of what questions are important and what results promised practicable contribu-tions to schooling. As a consequence many research endeavors appear sterile and trivial.

Course Memories.The lack of detailed and explicit characterizations of instruction have allowed the un-

checked proliferation of unduly simple conceptions of schooling. The lack of tangiblesense data has precluded the kind of interpretation and analysis of experience that stimu-lates researchable questions. Into this vacuum have rushed the simple conceptions andthe abstract notions of the experimental psychology of learning and the manufacturingapproaches of the engineering sciences. The records which schools usually keep of theirdeeds and accomplishments have not been sufficient for substantial and tangible por-trayals of the educational process and for the analysis of teaching. I propose to youthat such records are vitally needed to create conceptions of schooling that are suffi-ciently realistic for the application of natural science methods to instructional problems.There is nothing that we can do at this time that is more important than to establishcontinuous long time portrayals of the instructional process in a convenient and pal-pable form.

Records of instructional transactions as well as observations of students are incom-plete and episodic and the pulse of instruction is slow. The interval between repeatedpresentations of a course may be weeks, months, or even years. These conditions do notsuit the inductive capacity of the human mind well. Even if reasonable observationshad been made it would be difficult to infer causal relationships or prescribe effectivefuture actions from events occurring so far apart in time. A sidewalk salesman, offeringcarrot peelers on a busy street corner, is better able to understand what makes his pitcheffective than the most observant and thoughtful college professor caught in the statelyrhythms of the semester system. I believe that what is vitally needed to sharpen thepurpose of educational research and to guide fundamental experimentation into morefruitful channels are better instructional logs. We must make the educational processmore explicit by careful, protracted observations and we must counterbalance thediffusing effects of time by careful record-keeping. Careful documentation of the in-structional process over substantial periods of time is clearly needed for scientificstudies of instruction and the rational management of courses. One answer to thisdemand is the creation of institutions called course memories, which I have described indetail elsewhere (Rothkopf, 1973). The long range aim of a course memory system isprimarily scientific. It is to stimulate analysis of concrete data about instruction and toguide the intuition of the researcher in seeking fruitful experimental and theoretical

63

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

ERNST Z. ROTHKOPF

questions. Course memories, moreover, have some more immediate practical benefits.They provide for a continuous testing of the quality and relevance of instruction, thecreation of social mechanisms for producing certain desirable changes in school situa-tions, and as a source of credentials for instruction.

An institutional memory for courses is a school record-keeping system with scientificand applied uses. Let me describe briefly what I have in mind. One scheme for a coursememory which has actually been running on a trial basis for over two years (see Smith,1973) includes an observational plan, a computer-based record-keeping system, andconvenient procedures for consulting and analyzing the accumulating records of thesystem.

The basic classes of data collected to draw inferences about instruction include thefollowing four components: (1) Characterizations of Students: This involves personalvital information such as can be used in a demographic analysis of the student popula-tion, educational background, his work history, the results of aptitude tests, and bothgeneral and specialized achievement, tests. (2) Records of Instructional Transactions:These characterize and record the content of the instruction and describe how it wasdelivered. For relatively stable instructional techniques such as programmed instruction,video tapes, films, etc., transaction records include a catalog of the materials used, whenthey were used, and any notation about the context in which they were used. With un-stable instructional systems such as lectures, case work, and extemporaneous classroomdiscussion, these include an annotated lesson plan and an instructional log. (3) StudentPerformance: This includes an item-per-item record of student performance on selectedtest questions. The organizing principles for this array of data are derived from the courseobjectives. Instructional clerks, machine scoring service, or the on-line administrationof tests by computer are used to assure punctilious objectivity in scoring. (4) Follow-up Validation of Course Objectives: This includes a survey of the post-training uses ofcourse-relevant skills in order to determine whether instruction has served the students'purposes with respect to content, i.e., the empirical validation of course objectives.Questionnaires and direct job studies are used for this purpose. The data collectionand analysis procedures are of course very tentative and exploratory. I can imagine thatthey may change quite a lot as we gain experience.

The expenses and the energies that are required for the creation and maintenance ofcourse memories are considerable. This is no task for the individual scientific entre-preneur. However, much of the expense can be justified in terms of practical uses alone.What I want to discuss here however are its scientific and research uses. One of thecritical characteristics of a course memory system for scientific uses is that it must bewell adapted for human use. It must be a convenient system. Access must be easy andthe format of its outputs should be well suited to humans so as to encourage databrowsing. If it is a big hassle touse these records we might as well forget about thewhole enterprise.

One of the lines of reasoning behind the creation of a course memory is the following.We know that the sophistication of practical arts and their power and subtlety growwith experience. This often takes centuries. The practical arts of making and workingmetals for example took thousands of years to reach its present state. Why did it takeso long? There are three factors that appear to contribute to the slow growth of ex-perience. First of all the critical events, unusually transparent instances and fortunateinformative accidents were relatively rare. Their frequency in time was low and their

64

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH AS LEERLAUFREAKTION

occurrences had a wide geographical dispersion. Second, observers with the preparedminds and the necessary curiosity to interpret these revealing events were also relativelyuncommon. Consequently, if the probability of the informative event, Pi, was verylow and the probability of knowledgeable observers, Po, was also extremely small, thelikelihood of their joint occurrence, P/ x Po, was catastrophically miniscule. The likeli-hood of a productive interpretation of events was very small. Nor did the circumstancesof practicing craftsmen favor the empirical tests of interpretations and inferences aboutthe world of their craft.

One of the possibilities that computers, modern data processing techniques, and im-proved communications have created is the concentration of experiences. This is theidea behind course memories. The computer and good communications have made itpossible to simulate the effect of time by concentrating experiences, collecting them, andmaking the encounter between critical events and well-prepared observers more likely.This is an opportunity which we have not yet fully exploited in educational researchand this is the opportunity which we must earnestly try to create in order to improvethe researchers' intuitions. Natural science methods, e.g., experimentation, makes thesystematic testing of inferences and interpretations obtained in this way a relativelyefficient process. We assure this efficiency by training ourselves in methods of experi-mentation and statistical analysis. We have prepared our graduate students to test inter-pretations, conclusions, and to pursue the empirical answer to questions. But we havebeen negligent in creating the data base, the experiences, that will stimulate the ques-tions and conjectures that are to be tested. Course memories or some other tangibleopportunity to observe in a systematic way teaching teachers and learning students iswhat it takes to prevent experiments from being Leerlaufreaktionen. The experimentersneed more tangible events to think and wonder about in order to make experimentsmore than ritual and routine exercise of the skills that have been learned in graduateschool.

A rich collection of observations of instructional events is wanted because it pro-vides researchers with hypotheses as to what really makes a difference in learning. Italways has been a source of amazement to me how one's perceptions of theoreticalissues change when one begins to deal with concrete palpable events. The most dramaticinstances for me occur when one, in planning an experiment, actually begins to selectexperimental materials and procedure. The entire complexion of a study frequentlychanges at this point and one begins to see issues to which one has been completelyblind before.

Contact with the data of real instructional transactions not only is of help in selectingexperimental hypotheses and in more realistic theoretical formulations. It may alsogive some insight into what the problems in instruction really are. It is typical to seecharacterizations of instructional problems in terms of performance deficiences of stu-dents such as inadequate reading or arithmetic scores in 6th graders. Such characteri-zations are not sufficient because they tell us only some symptoms and very little aboutthe conditions that are associated with them. Going from symptom to experimentationwith radical remedies is somewhat like getting reports about loud crash-like noises alongrailroad tracks and launching development work on means of land transportation thatmight serve as alternatives to railroad travel.

We know very little for example of what is actually covered in school, how muchtime is spent on each topic, or how stable such characteristics of instruction actually are

65

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

ERNST Z. ROTHKOPF

within a school, fron year to year, or for a single teacher. This is the kind of data thatour work on course memories is just beginning to reveal. It is my contention that it isjust this type of data that is needed to place performance deficiencies in appropriatecontext. And, of course, when we can describe the context in which certain performancedeficiencies occur, we are beginning to understand an instructional problem. I, for oneam convinced that we have some surprises in store for us when this type of data becomesreadily available.

This is a very simple idea and will not appeal to those who crave elegance and statelyscholarly language. I believe however that it deserves high priority. It does not matterwhat exact form course memories may take or what they are called. What is importantis that we make a major effort to systematically document the practical enterprise ofteaching and of learning. Without doing so instruction will remain a nebulous enterpriseand we will have no clear idea what the problems are that we are trying to solve byexperimentation and by theorizing. I believe our understanding of these problems iswoefully weak right now and probably often wrong. And yet most of us act as if theseproblems were fairly clear and we were earnest and public-minded scientists who are try-ing to solve them. This is a cruel charade.

Finally, another reason why more complete instructional records are needed is thatthe support of educational research and development by public and private agenciesdepends on general confidence in whether expected results will make a difference inrealistic educational enterprises. No one will ever know whether anything makes adifference in the world of schools or that research is needed if schools remain elusiveenterprises that do not keep track of their deeds and of their accomplishments in exactand detailed ways. The episodic experiment is not a good tool for measuring the realisticimpact of scientific innovation and new developments upon schools. The current effortsand the current effectiveness of schools must be a matter of record. This record is ofvital importance to schoolmen, scientists, instructional technologists, and taxpayers alike.The development of satisfactory techniques for obtaining and keeping such records for•substantial aspects of schooling deserves the expenditure of substantial resources and ofour best abilities. The effect of instructional and learning research and the impact of in-structional technology on schools will remain uncertain until schooling has become atangible enterprise known to us by clear records. We need to find out not only what theinstructional problems really are but also if we have helped to solve them.

REFERENCES

LORENZ, K. Über den Begriff der Instinkthandlung. Folia Biotheoretica, 1937, 2, 18-50.ROTHKOPF, E. Z. Two scientific approaches to the management of instruction. In R. M. Gagne

and W. J. Gephart (Eds.), Learning research and school subjects. Itasca, Illinois: F. E. Peacock,1968, 107-132.

ROTHKOPF, E. Z. Experiments on mathemagenic behavior and the technology of written instruc-tion. In E. Z. Rothkopf and P. E. Johnson (Eds.) Verbal learning research and the technology ofwritten instruction. New York: Columbia Teachers College Press, 1971, 284-303.

ROTHKOPF, E. Z. Structural text features and the control of processes in learning from writtenmaterial. In R. 0. Freedle and J. B. Carroll, (Eds.) Language comprehension and the acquisitionof knowledge. Washington: V. H. Winston & Sons, 1972, 315-334.

ROTHKOPF, E. Z. A proposal for documenting teaching enterprises: Institutional memories forcourses to foster the growth of instructional science and to assure instructional quality. Unpub-lished manuscript, 1973.

SMITH, M.E. The course maintenance system, an example of a computer-based course memory. Apaper given at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, NewOrleans, Louisiana, February 28, 1973.

TINBERGEN, N. The study of instinct. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951.

66

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

UQ

Lib

rary

] at

01:

42 1

3 N

ovem

ber

2014