EDUC 602

Research Projects

Young Edgar Dale hurled the first salvo in his 1929 critical analysis of the teaching/learning process in American education entitled, "A Factual Basis for Curriculum Revision in Arithmetic," (1929) and the revolution was on. No doubt, there were more stringent activists among the rebels "unmasking the process of institutionalized education" in America. For early revolutionary educational theorists, such as John Holt and Edgar Z. Friedenberg and "others of their critical cult, the process of "unmasking" became alarming in its overtones of nihilism." (Hoban, 1973) Traditionalists, such as Professor Philip Jackson; however, entrenched themselves in a "things-as-they-are- in-the-classroom" position during the early days of the fray. Although he "likened the social organization of the schools to nothing less than a prison," he remained a staunch opponent to "an engineered approach to teaching," as he described much of what was being advocated by the revolutionary thinkers of the day. However, the reluctance of professional educators and the boards of education they served to face "the facts of institutional underachievement, and to reorder educational priorities accordingly, led to a broad-based state of public distrust of American schools" by the American public. (Hoban, 1973) It was being said in many quarters that professional educators were not competent to perform the tasks of education, and that the responsibility for educational planning, management, and administration should be turned over to others from the private sector or world of business. It was, therefore, beneath this backdrop of confusion and conflict within the professional educational community, that Edgar Dale began his career as an educator and education reformer.

Edgar Dale began his teaching career in a rural school in North Dakota in 1918. During the next decade, he spent much of his time and energy exploring ways to improve communications in his classroom. As a youngster in his native Minnesota, Edgar had become very interested in motion pictures -- an interest he carried on into his college studies at the University of North Dakota, where he earned both his bachelors and masters degrees in education. His interest in motion pictures as an educational medium led to a position on the editorial staff at Eastman Teaching Films in Rochester, New York in 1928. One year later, he joined the faculty at Ohio State University in Columbus, and became a research assistant in the now defunct Bureau of Educational Research. This career move provided an excellent platform from which he launched many innovations in the teaching/learning process, particularly as it relates to the use of audio-visual methods and materials in American classrooms.

During the turbulent years of the 1930s, when Dr. Dale began his career as a college instructor, methods of teaching and learning in the American classrooms relied mostly upon textbooks and instructor's lectures. (1972) In college and high school classrooms throughout the nation, professors and teachers stood before their classes and talked, seldom providing opportunity for their students to actively respond. The students dutifully copied down the professors' or teachers' words in their notebooks. (Dale, 1972) Often student grades were assigned based-upon the quantity or appearance of their notebooks. Tests were not designed to measure a student's ability to think or to solve real problems, only their ability to remember facts long enough to pass an examination on them. Learning was by rote and pedantic, and the schools were viewed by the revolutionary factions as more of "a sorting system" than as "a teaching system." (Wagner, 1973).

When he published "How to Appreciate Motion Pictures," (Dale, 1933), young Edgar Dale complained that "surveying education at almost any level in the United States, one realizes that most instruction and methods use memorization rather than thinking as the key instructional process." Later, when it was suggested that massive reforms be made to correct the failures of the schools to prepare students for life in a literate society, i.e., to develop reading and problem-solving skills, the power elite in the educational community first balked at the accusations, then admitted, albeit reluctantly, that there was, indeed, a need for some changes in the system, but hedged the question with the admonishment that it would cost money to do so; with having to develop an evaluation program, technical staffing, etc. "all of which should have been in place in the first place." (Hoban, 1973)

When he became a professor at Ohio State University in 1939, Professor Dale was well on his way to developing many new approaches to teaching and learning; always with an eye towards improving the way information is transferred from instructor to learner. Accordingly, he believed that educational institutions should assume a greater leadership role in performing many of the critical tasks facing the world. "The land grant colleges, established with a grant of over 11 million acres, revolutionized agriculture and agriculture education. Today, we need revolutionary approaches in improving the quality of modern education. And new materials and methods of instruction can help significantly to achieve this revolution." (Dale, 1974).

Earlier, John Dewey, an outstanding contributor to educational theory, had declared that "method means that arrangement of subject matter which makes it effective in use. Never is method something outside of material." In the development of his approach, Dr. Dale sought to emphasize the difference between using methods and materials of instruction to train some to do specific tasks, and using them to educate the individual. In his view, there were significant differences between training and educating. He believed that training had specific limitations established in the stated goals and objectives of the instruction. "Generally, the training program is laid out for its prospective users. A trained person does not map out his own educational plan; he is dependent on someone else. An educated person, on the other hand, "maps his own education and grows from dependence to independence; he is not a slave of habit because he constantly examines his habits and makes desired changes." (Dale, 1974) This thinking ultimately led him to believe that education could be revolutionized, but to do so would require systemic changes in the current methods and materials of instruction used in America. At this juncture, Dr. Dale began to perceive the need for instructional systems design, which required that a whole new set of disciplines be imposed upon curriculum developers and educational planners.

As the world became more complex during the 1960s, Dr. Dale saw, instead of the educational reform he had envisioned, curriculum developers "still carrying over into a complex world the methods and materials of instruction of a simpler society." (1974) In that simpler society, he describes the child as a partner of the everyday events that occurred in the home, on the farm, or in the family workshop. The child's development centered around such daily activities as cooking, milking, spinning; raising livestock, and planting and harvesting crops. The materials of instruction used in the home introduced the young learner to the world he would grow to know and cherish as his very own. Another view sees the child as an "apprentice" who is coached, and whose talents are nurtured into full maturity. "Do like your elders tell you," was the rule of the day. Children learned by assisting and imitating the adults or older siblings in the performance of the routine tasks compatible to life on the farm. Much of the instruction and learning attained by the child was based on the actual performance of tasks related to a given event. The child talked, imitated, dressed, painted, constructed, and participated in hundred of similar activities by following examples set by the adults in his immediate environment. In these cases, an adequate or good performance was the goal, and when the child could produce a satisfactory performance of the task, the event was over and the teaching ceased. In these cases, all materials used in the instruction was usually an integral part of the event. The adults saw themselves as teachers, or "tutors" for the event.

Around the sixth birthday, the child is compelled to exchange the familiar home environment, where he/she had learned to milk the cow, ride the pony, knit, sew, cook, and care for livestock and pets, all by precept and example, for the school environment, where teachers stood before the class, day-after-day, and talked at them while students sat, dutifully taking notes, and listening. Professor Dale wrote compassionately about the need for systemic change in the way schools and colleges went about their work of educating America's youth.

As the complexities of the modern world of the 1970s and 1980s imposed harsh new requirements for success upon its students, an "army" of pioneers in instructional systems development, such as Professor Dale rose to meet the challenge through their demands for educational reforms. At the base of it all, these reforms involved making adjustments in two essential elements, 1) the adaptation of the individual learner to appropriate teaching materials, and 2) the adaptation of the instruction to the specific need of the learner. (Dale, 1974)

To promote these new adaptations, Professor Dale began to promote a systems approach to planning instruction based on the concept that the curriculum, as well as the teachers, the schools, and the system itself should reward curiosity and creativity in learners by preparing appropriate learning methods and materials for instruction so the learner can achieve his or her goal. Professor Dale thought that the kinds of instruction needed was broader than the purposes of the school itself, and included the purposes of the society in which they would be used. (1974) He saw that the instructional programs of the past were geared primarily for producing individuals who would keep the industrial wheels rolling at an increasingly productive rate. The environments of the home and community were perceived as key factors in the teaching/learning matrix because of the influence they had on the experiences and attitudes of the learners. Significant learning experiences are attained through association with parents, with the learner's peers and playmates, with books, radio, television, movies, and other media-guided experiences within the community. Further, Dr. Dale felt that the new methods and materials of instruction should deal with all categories of human behavior -- knowing, feeling, and doing.

The three functioning elements of instructional design that ultimately lead to the desired educational outcomes are: 1) the learner, who brings a background of information, attitudes, and skills to the learning situation, 2) the teacher, who brings to the instructional interaction her knowledge and competency, and 3) the instructional material itself -- the planned (hopefully) experiences with which the learner will interact. The instruction should be designed to develop the rich, first-handed learning experiences so necessary for building new and useful attitudes and concepts. (Dale, 1978). The bringing together of these elements, then, the learner, the teacher, and the instructional materials was the primary focus of the early educational reformers. Again, Dr. Dale led the charge by promoting the following guides to help educators plan instructional systems and curricula aimed at achieving desired outcomes in the modern classroom:

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which enables a person to do the best that he can, to be fulfilled.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which generates knowledge.

Ÿ That knowledge can be generated either by adding to or by making better use of what the learner already knows.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth that enables us to work efficiently and effectively in the organization and application of ideas.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which enables us to see the wholeness of our life -- the system which is at work whether we recognize it or not.

Ÿ That knowledge is best which can be learned.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which enables us to tell the difference between fact and opinion, evidence and propaganda, and the logical from the illogical.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which enables us to share ideas with others.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which contributes a sense of joy, exhilaration, and poignancy to the life of the learner.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth that enables persons and societies to know where it hurts, and know what to do not only to relieve the pain, but also to cure it.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which enhances the mutuality of human beings and develops a sense of community, and doing the important things together.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which enables an individual to see the cause and effect relationships between choices and their consequences, a characteristic of a moral man.

Ÿ That knowledge is of most worth which helps individuals recognize knowledge that is of most worth. (Dale, 1972)

Having applied the guides in the development of a basic curricula, the planner, then, re-examines his purposes for the plan. If his primary purpose is to develop a thinking, sensitive, mature individual, a tailor-made curriculum is required for each person, that is, an individualized and personal curriculum configured to the needs and capabilities of each learner. But, the problem of convincing teachers to individualize instruction has been, and continues to be the bane of the concept. Professor Dale suggests that the most beneficial approach would be to convince the students to tailor a curriculum for themselves. (1974) Working together, the teacher and student (and parent) could devise an individualized instruction plan based on a series of structured learning tasks, through which all students in the class would matriculate at varying rates of speed. In such an individualized plan, much of the learning would take place outside the presence of the teacher. Students would be able to choose from a variety of methods of assessment; in large groups, through face-to-face tutoring, in small groups of twos and threes, or in independent study. The flagship of the design is the understanding that individual students learn at different rates and in different ways, and that each student must play an active role in choosing his or her own learning package, i.e., the methods and the materials to be used in the instruction. In essence, the learner would be instructed on how to teach themselves. In Professor Dale's vision, an individualized approach to instructional design would include credit for self-study programs, such as correspondence courses, or advanced placement examinations, which is, by the way, how Dr. Dale himself completed his bachelor's degree at the University of North Dakota in three years instead of four.

Much of the criticism encountered by Dr. Dale during his illustrious career as an educational revisionist and instructional systems designer centered around what he called his "common sense approach." The revisions he demanded in the use of methods and materials of instruction required that learning systems be revised from the ground up. Although he was made a full professor of education at Ohio State University in 1939, he kept his messages and language relatively simple and easy to understand. Some of his colleagues felt that he should have enshrouded himself more in the erudition of the profession, and use language more apt to be found in textbooks and journals than in newspapers and "lesser" publications. But, not unlike revolutionaries in politics, science, economics, and other areas of human endeavor, Dr. Dale had a vision of a new deal for his constituents and maintained a rigorous intellectual attack upon those who stood in opposition. In "An Overview of the Psychology of Learning," (Dull, 1977) he laid out his proposition for advancing revolutionary thinking in the form of six generalizations for helping teachers and learners achieve greater success in the classroom. Though viewed as "common sense" in today's liberal learning environments, these generalizations formed the pivotal point for "change" in planning for individualized instruction during the 1960s and 1970s.

1. The clearer, the nearer, the more realistic and relevant the statement of desired outcomes; the more effective the learning. Until this revolutionary thought entered the teaching/learning matrix, many professors and teachers were often vague and unclear about the changes they expected within their students While the vision of student "changes" might have been clear in the minds of the teacher, the meanings were often lost in the language used to convey the message to the learners.

2. We learn what we practice. Dr. Dale was very explicit in his observation that human behavior is governed by the activities of the individual -- whatever those activities might be. The fact that a learner may learn something wrong by practicing it wrong had been uncovered through his keen observations.

3. You must teach for transfer. Old learning does not automatically transfer to new learning. Dr. Dale stated that "all of us have a large reservoir of inert knowledge which does not help us solve new problems because we have not practiced using it in new ways. We need guided practice in learning to transform or reconstruct our habitual way of doing things."

4. Learning is increased by knowledge of results. Dr. Dale recommends "prompt, reinforcing feedback." Learners must also learn what they should not have done for true learning to take place.

5. We learn best what is meaningful. Students learn best by varying methods; therefore, one should use various methods in teaching.

6. Learning must be organized for sequence and cumulative effects. The learner must perceive some organization to what he is to learn. Dr. Dale admonishes us to teach in-depth, a number of systematized generalizations to organize learning around a few key, persistent issues.

Professor Edgar Dale's illustrious career began to wrap itself in the folds of evolution by 1972, when he published Building a Learning Environment (1972), in which he articulated the fundamental principles that underpinned his philosophy and vision for the future of education in America. In this publication, he is able to integrate the three major facets that guided his career.

As the war wound down and returning veterans re-entered school to complete their education on the G. I. Bill, Dr. Dale released a series of reports, many via his newsletter, aptly named, The News Letter, in which he complained about another irritating problem, i.e., the restrictive "use of colorful and meaningful language in the school environment." (1937) That same year, he published "How To Read A Newspaper," (1937) in which he castigated the use of dull, drab language in newspapers and other public media, and provided suggestions for the use of more colorful language in print; using words that created pictures and images in the minds of the reader. Very soon, he found there were other professionals in the field of education who had also tired of the complex language used in the classrooms to explain simple, everyday living phenomena. In 1939, he published a "Bibliography of Vocabulary Studies," (1939) in which he identified publications of vocabulary studies and modern language usage in the schools. Later, he would find the dedicated work he invested in these language studies to pay off, when Dr. Dale was commissioned to help develop and sit on the board of the New World Book Encyclopedia. (Tyler-Williams, 1973)

3) A Proponent of curricula reconstruction and instructional systems design.

In 1974, Professor Edgar Dale published The Humane Leader (1974). After more than forty years of struggle, helping to raise audiovisual methods and materials to a respectable, if not indispensable, position as an instructional tool, and directing the public attention towards modern language usage, Dr. Dale tended to sum up his thoughts on the directions education in America was taking. He demonstrated how learning through instructional systems design can create new vistas of education for all kinds of learners. He proposed many ways that teachers and school systems can design instruction so that each learner can progress at his or her own learning speed; learning precisely those things they need to know, in an effective and efficient way. Thus, this three-pronged attack earned Dr. Edgar Dale a reputation for "being able to get things done."

I selected Dr. Edgar Dale from the list mainly because of my personal experiences in the use of audiovisual aids and methods in my classroom. When I began teaching mathematics in the early 1970s, I became frustrated because my eighth grade classes simple could not seem to grasp the use of measuring devices, e.g., rulers, compasses, protractors, etc. No matter how hard I tried, most of these inner city children simply could not remember how these tools should work. I thought myself a dismal failure before I could get the first semester of my new career behind me. I visited with my college professor and told her of my dilemma. She gave me a copy of Jerrold Kemp's Planning and Producing Audiovisual Materials (1971) and said, "Use your imagination." A few days later, I entered my classroom had scissors and construction paper for everyone, and we began to measure and cut figures. During the next days, many of my colleagues wanted to know what I was doing that created such enthusiasm in my classes. When I showed them, I was branded an educational heretic -- I had dared to stray from the "straight and narrow." Children were having fun, learning. My principal, though, was very pleased with the progress of my students, and later asked me to present a staff development session on "Classroom Uses of Available Audiovisual Materials."

During the following years, I became an avid user of film, slides, charts, graphs, drawings and anything else I could think of, to create pictures and images in the minds of my young students. Today, it is computers, CD-ROMs, scanners, videodiscs, television, and the like, along with a host of new and exciting software. In an Overview to the Psychology of Learning, (Dull, 1977) Dr. Dale points out that one of the great weaknesses in the current teaching and learning methodology is the failure of the teacher, textbook writer or instruction presenter to ascertain what a student already knows before proceeding with a course of instruction. We live in an era that "demands that (students) learn more, learn it faster, remember it better, and apply it more skillfully." (Dale, 1972)

Today's, students are, indeed, learning more, learning it faster, remembering it better, and applying it more skillfully, and most seem to be happier doing it. I am grateful for the dedication of those early pioneers, such as Professor Edgar Dale, whose visions and dogged determination have helped to pave the way for a new generation of teachers, like me.

Bibliography

Dale, Edgar. (1959) Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching (Revised Edition). Columbus: Henry Holt and Company.

Dale, Edgar and Belland, John. (1971) A Guide to Literature on Audiovisual Instruction. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Dale, Edgar. (1972) Building a Learning Environment. Bloomingdale. Indiana: Phi Delta Kappan.

Dull, Lloyd W. (ed.) (1977) The Heart of Instruction. Columbus: Curriculum Materials Service.

Hoban, Charles F. (1973) Educational Communication in a Revolutionary Age . Educational Communication in a Revolution Age. Worthington, Ohio: Charles A. Jones Publishing Co.

Kemp, Jerrold E. (1980) Planning and Producing Audiovisual Materials (4th Edition). New York: Harper and Row, Publishers.

Tyler, I. Keith and Williams, Catherine M. (1973). Educational Communication in a Revolution Age. Worthington, Ohio: Charles A. Jones Publishing Co.

Wagner, Robert W. (1973). Minds at Large in an Age of Revolution . Educational Communication in a Revolution Age. Worthington, Ohio: Charles A. Jones Publishing Co.