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Concept
Keller Plan
Summary
The Keller Plan, also called the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), was developed by Fred S. Keller with J. Gilmour Sherman, Carolina Bori, and Rodolpho Azzi in the middle 1960s as an innovative method of instruction for the then-new University of Brasília. PSI was conceived of as an application of Skinner's theories of learning, grounded in operant conditioning strategies of behaviorism.
Keller argued that effective instruction should incorporate five principles, the essential elements of the Keller Plan:
Written materials—The primary presentation of new content should be through written texts. Given the forms of media available at the time when the Keller Plan was developed (e.g., lectures, movies, audio records, television, radio, paper-based text, etc.), paper-based texts gave students the greatest freedom; books and texts are portable, can be read at one's own pace, can be started and stopped at any time, can be easily reviewed, and can be marked by the reader. As an application of behaviorism, the Keller Plan was meant to maximize the number of operant behaviors that could be reinforced; this could best be done with written materials rather than have the learner be a passive observer of other media. Digital media available today could not provide the same kinds of learner control. Presumably, unintended consequences might arise if incorporated into a contemporary implementation of PSI, due to many additional operant behaviors that cannot be controlled by the student or teacher.
Units of content—Subject matter material should be broken down into separable, meaningful units. These units could have various kinds of relationships; for example, one could provide prerequisites for understanding a second, or the second could provide deeper elaboration of a proceeding unit. In any case, specific learning objectives should be definable for each discrete unit of content.
Self-paced instruction—Students should be allowed to advance through the course material at their own pace.
Official source
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