The Science for the Job

Abstract

The paper deals with the contribution of empirical psychology to the problems of instruction. At issue is the sort of conceptual framework needed to promote helpful interactions between existing experimenters and teachers. The resulting discussion asks for a change of attitude and a critique of language used. Experimenters in cognition and learning and classroom instructors are argued to be in the same line of business—deriving definition of task in hand by testing instructions in action, or, to put it another way, developing task description by prescription. It is argued therefore that teachers need to stop seeing experimenters as people engaged in mysterious “scientific” activity, when the activity in question is much the same as their own, and that experimenters need to take a good look at what they actually do, and note the interventionist, instructional logic that underlies it. It is concluded that the study of instructional problems will benefit enormously if instructional practitioners contribute their knowledge to a demystified experimental enterprise, which can be modelled on current practice, if not on current talk about that practice. Teachers are advised to look closely at what it is experimenters do, while experimenters are advised that scientific advance will require the expansion of current efforts in the study of individual performance.